Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Genesis 3 ends on a decisive, and decisively negative, note. Yahweh “drove the man out” of the garden, and, in addition, “at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim, and the flaming sword which turned every direction, to guard the way to the tree of life.”…
When she died in 2005 at the age of 72, Anna Haycraft, the author who published under the name Alice Thomas Ellis, was a celebrated writer in Great Britain. While working at Duckworth Publishers(which her husband owned), she produced a dozen novels, a collection of short stories, a cookbook, volumes…
Some have suggested recently that my "project" is postmodern. To clarify my views on postmodernism, I'm re-posting something I wrote in 2005, with a few modifications. For a fuller discussion, you can check out my Solomon among the Postmoderns (Canon, 2008). First, it is helpful to distinguish, as many writers…
Calling Jerusalem the "holy city" comes so naturally to Christians that it comes as something of a surprise to realize how infrequently the phrase is used in Scripture. Not only is Jerusalem rarely called holy, but in the Old Testament this classification is found only in texts that refer to…
Asking why the church doesn’t sing hymns or even why men don’t sing in church is a bit like lamenting over the lame man who can’t waltz on the dance floor. While it is a valid question, the more immediate question would seem to be, “why doesn’t the lame man…
The theme of 1 Timothy is the distinction between the true children in the Household of God and false children who really belong to the household of Satan. This is seen in the fact that in the chiastic structure of the Epistle, heresy is the subject in the center (…
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For reasons that I’ll detail in a subsequent post, I’m a considerable fan of Nicholas of Cusa. I was unhappy to come across this from William Cavanaugh: “The origin of the modern concept of religion can be seen clearly in the thought of two fifteenth-century Christian Platonist thinkers, Nicholas of…
Michael Budde writes, “Like the Rolling Stones and other major concert acts, the Catholic Church has now taken on corporate sponsorship to underwrite the world tours of its major performer, Pope John Paul II. To finance his 1998 visit to Mexico city, the Archdiocese of Mexico City entered into sponsorship…
The story of 2 Kings 1 is undoubtedly meant humorously. Ahaziah falls ill and sends messengers off to consult with Baal-zebub, baal of the flies. On the way, his messengers meet a “baal of hair,” Elijah - right title, wrong god. Yahweh will not allow Ahaziah’s men ever to get…
Here are some highlights of Marjorie Garber?s essay on Richard III in Shakespeare After All . 1) Garber suggests that Richard is the ?first fully realized and psychologically conceived character?Ein Shakespeare?s plays. Richard?s character is fully realize because he is complex, protean, chameleon and Machiavellian (cf. 3 Henry VI 3.2.191-193).…
A further note from Haight: One of the criticisms he lodges against Aquinas and scholasticism is that it tended to treat grace and conversion in a mechanistic fashion: “This is a fundamental distortion of the dynamics of grace when it is seen contrasted with a personalist description, and it has…
Underlying different doctrines of justification, and inseparable from them, are different notions of grace. The historical issues have been ably summarized by Roger Haight in his 1979 book, The Experience and Language of Grace. Haight points out that doctrines of grace have differed partly because the reality of grace is…
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