Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"Vanity of vanities", says the Preacher. "All is vanity". Life, we are told in the book of Ecclesiastes, is a repetitious, wearisome cycle; all that is and all that will be has already been. There is nothing new under the sun. What is crooked cannot be made straight, what is…
The Bible tells us that when God created the earth, He set up three zones of life. The first was the world itself. The second was the holy land of Eden. And the third was the Garden in Eden, God’s sanctuary. God told Adam and Eve that every tree was…
In our survey of Biblical chronology we have arrived at the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which provide chronological information for the period after the return from exile, the Restoration Period of Old Testament history. The question we begin to address in this essay is whether the Artaxerxes of these…
These verses from the Sermon on the Mount are generally taken in connection with Jesus’ earlier statement concerning adultery in the heart (vv. 27-28); the eye and the hand have obvious relevance to the sin of adultery. At the same time, most commentators admit that the principle of avoiding occasions…
17. The eye that mocks a father, And despises to obey a mother, The ravens of the valley will pick it out, And the young eagles will eat it. 18. There are three things that are too wonderful for me, Four that I do not understand: 19. The way of…
The modern Church in America and virtually everywhere else is ideology-centered, not geographical. This is because various Churches believe different things and have different customs of worship and sacraments. The ideological Church has gradually developed from the time of the Reformation, because accuracy of doctrine has become more important to…
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Why should there be a final judgment when God judges in time? Aquinas answers: “Judgment on something changeable cannot be rendered fully before its consummation. Thus judgment cannot be rendered fully regarding the quality of any action before its completion, both in itself and its results, because many actions appear…
1) Verse 4 moves from the affliction of the apostles (“our”) to the comfort of “those who are in any affliction.” This movement does not depend on any similarity or identity between the affliction of the apostles and the affliction of other sufferers (though cf. v. 6b). Members of the…
A few notes on Descartes, Meditations 1-2, with lots of help from Jean-Luc Marion. Descartes’s ego cogito, ergo sum is not, Marion points out, original, at least in its form. It has origins in Augustine, who offered this response to the skeptics: “I have no fear of the arguments of…
Some scattered thoughts inspired by comments from Chris Schlect and Doug Wilson at a faculty discussion of de Lubac today: How is it that theologians (like Norman Shepherd, Steve Wilkins, Rich Lusk, and others) who want to expunge the notion of merit from theology get accused of being “neo-nomians” and…
Milbank asks the intriguing question of whether de Lubac’s surnaturel thesis “rather deconstructs the terms of the Schleiermacher/Barth divide.” He appears to mean that the polarization of Schleiermacher’s “intrinicism” and Barth’s “extrinicisim” is dissolved by de Lubac’s Thomist understand of nature and grace. To adopt, for the moment, an idiom…
Milbank contrasts de Lubac’s advocacy of patristic and medieval hermeneutics, which insists that the allegorical fulfills and completes the literal, with the Yale school, which he sees as living in “the no-man’s land of ‘history-like narrative’ which at once abolishes real history and ignores the essential allegorical underpinning of Christian…
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