Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For many people Christmas comes on December 25 and is over December 26. The tree is taken down along with the lights and the other decorations, and everyone begins setting the house in order for the new year. No more Christmas hymns. No more celebrations (well, until New Year’s Eve).…
The Ascension and the Incarnation should not be disconnected in our Christmas thinking or celebrations. As N.T. Wright notes, the ascension is "a central and vital feature without which all sorts of other things start to go demonstrably wrong. . . . where the ascension has been ignored or misunderstood,…
“In the Word was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness.” Thus John describes the incarnation of the Son. He comes as the living and life-giving light of the world. That’s good news. In the beginning, God spoke and light shone…
Christmas is all about Jesus. The angels announce Jesus’ birth, shepherds and wise men come to see Jesus, Herod wants to kill Jesus. We occasionally think of the Father who sent the Son, but we keep returning to the Son made flesh in Bethlehem’s manger. Meanwhile, as always, the Spirit…
Christmas is about many things, but one of the chief things revealed in the gospel of Christmas is the humility of God. We don't often think of humility as an attribute of God. If God is glorious and exalted, we think, He must be haughty and proud and self-centered. We…
John famously begins his Gospel with a piece of theology: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Matthew starts with a genealogy. John celebrates Advent with a hymn, Matthew with a list. For John, Jesus is the Word of creation…
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A fine statement from Iris Murdoch on the capacity of literature to seek and reveal truth: "I think that though they are so different, philosophy and literature are both truth-seeking and truth-revealing activities. They are cognitive activities, explanations. Literature, like other arts, involves exploration, classification, discrimination, organized vision. Of course…
Gavin Hyman ( A Short History of Atheism ) doesn't think contemporary atheists are aware of the origins and cultural conditions of their own unfaith. They suffer from "a lack of awareness of atheism’s own origins, of the historical, philosophical and cultural matrix out of which it emerged, of its…
In Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece , Rosalind Thomas surveys the current state of Homeric studies. In the background is the Millman-Lord thesis that the epics are the product of oral improvisation. Thomas discerns two schools: “On the one hand, the formulaic theory of Parry and Lord is being…
Thomas Schirrmacher ( God Want You to Learn, Labor, and Love ) outlines a Trinitarian conception of labor. Work, like all human activity, has its uncreated origin in God. We are able to work because we are made in the image of a God of labor: "In the Bible, man’s…
Robert Jenson addresses this perennial question ( Systematic Theology , 1.228-9) in a characteristically Jensonian fashion, by reminding us of the dynamics of discourse: "In all true mutual discourse . . . each must be both subject for and object of the other. As I am present to address you,…
The following was first published in 2011 at Firstthings.com . “By the twelfth century,” Christopher Page writes in his magisterial The Christian West and Its Singers (2010), “the Latin West could be imagined as a soundscape of Latin chant.” From the eighth-century alliance of Pope Stephen with the Frankish King…
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