Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man,” wrote Chesterton. Leviticus 11 stands as a lovely example of his sentiment. Designations of “clean” and “unclean” first appear in Genesis 7 with no explanation other than “clean” animals being later utilized as acceptable sacrifices to Yahweh (Gen…
TIME magazine announced this summer that scientists at Colossal Biosciences in Dallas, Texas had resurrected the long extinct dire wolf through gene editing of gray wolves and modern canines. The dire wolf is a relative of modern wolves, though it’s unclear exactly what their relationship with them is, whether they…
Through my years of pastoring in a Presbyterian context, I’ve had many conversations about the propriety of paedo-baptism versus credo-baptism. From time to time, a congregant will become convinced that paedo-baptism is the biblical practice. But baptism by sprinkling? Never! “That’s not in the Bible,” they’ll say. “The Bible clearly…
I have written a book on this and related issues, especially as addressed in Proverbs. If you want to see these thoughts further developed (which is new material based on my reflections on Proverbs), check out Solomon Says . Is asking God for a new heart always right or sometimes…
In the Abolition of Man C.S. Lewis utilized a common English textbook to explain the unacknowledged and self-contradictory philosophy undergirding much of the humanities departments in his day. I am no Jack Lewis. But perhaps this essay might prod one of my intellectual betters to take on a similar task…
This primer on Christian nationalism grew mainly out of discussions on X. The term “Christian nationalism,” as I use it here, has become something of an umbrella term for conservative/traditional Protestants who want to see Christian influence on national life and culture. Obviously, some see problems with the label –…
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Hippolytus tells the story that Apsethus of Libya trained parrots to fly over North Africa crying out “Apsethus is a god,” and Libyans were taken in and began to offer sacrifices to him. Then a “clever Greek” caught one of the parrots, and retrained it to cry out: “Apsethus, having…
In his encyclopedic Later Roman Empire , A. H. M. Jones explains that the church after Constantine failed to transform ordinary social behavior and culture not because it was too lax but because it was too rigorist. Ordinary Christians felt they couldn’t live up to the standards, and responded by…
Michael Hollerich, who has done some superb revisionist work on Eusebius of Caesarea, explains in a 1990 article from Church History that Eusebius employed a “similar situation” form of typology that focuses on similarities rather than differences between type and antitype, and draws out the similarities in great detail. He…
Milbank, discussing the possibility of educative coercion: “although Christianity . . . certainly requires in the end free consent to the truth, it does not fetishize this freedom merely as a correct mode of approach: truth is what most matters, and moreover a collective commitment to truth, since truth itself…
Milbank notes that “science and art have always first mimed the horrors to come.” Darwinian evolution and avant-garde prepared the way, for foreshadowed, twentieth-century horrors. He asks, “what may the far more shocking interventions of 1990s art and science . . . betoken for the present century?’
Milbank opens Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (Radical Orthodoxy) with a discussion of neo-Kantian arguments concerning radical evil. In the light of the Holocaust and twentieth-century totalitarianism, they argue, the traditional Augustinian privatio is deeply inadequate. In response, Milbank relativizes totalitarianism by arguing that “European and American liberal democracy has…
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