Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the beginning, this was home. The world, I mean. Creation wasn’t just a series of unconnected events, a flashy display of building prowess. Yes, creation was intended to give God glory—which I guess you could say means that the creation was supposed to show the greatness—the weight —of God.…
We think we know. God is a stern Rule-Maker who has a bit of an anger management problem. Or, God is the indulgent Daddy in the sky. Or, God used to be a stern Ruler, but he got nice. Christians don't believe any of that. Christians say the one God…
Unfortunately today, baptism seems so… tiny . It’s actually… cute (maybe sweet?) when it’s given to a child. A little baby, a small gathering of people, a little bowl of water, tiny drops sprinkled upon the little baby’s head followed by a small applause and a short prayer. How… small!…
Early on in the history of the church, Christians understood that the 1st century Jewish practice of meeting for prayer at set times of the day was a good and biblical practice to continue. We find references to this in several places in Scripture. In Acts 3 we find Peter…
Editors’ note: For those interested in a review of Richard Hays’s latest book, see here . Richard Hays is a renowned New Testament scholar. The professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School originally studied English literature, giving his reading of Scripture a pronounced literary sensibility. He’s perhaps best known…
As many commentators point out, Genesis is structured by 10 uses of the word toledoth , "generations." The word means something along the lines of "begotten things," and the toledoth statements head the various sections of Genesis. When Genesis 2:4 announces "these are the begettings of heaven and earth" and…
Showing page 106 of 309
Showing page 40 of 43
John’s gospel is a contentious courtroom of a gospel. Legal language dominates the whole gospel - witnesses are called, Jesus promises an advocate, the Jews are constantly trying to put Jesus in the dock. But the whole gospel is really the trial of the Jews, just as what appears to…
Homer’s prologue to the Odyssey delays the identification of the hero until the end of the prologue, a literary sign that this hero comes hidden, disguised, in craft. That, of course, is precisely how Odysseus behaves throughout the epic. John’s gospel begins with similar techniques. We learn about the Word…
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus can be read as dramatizing the Augustinian perspective most recently articulated by Oliver O’Donovan, namely, that “within every political society there occurs, implicitly, an act of worship of divine rule.” Through his dramatization of Roman society, Shakespeare points to another act of worship that constitutes a different sort…
JL Austin famously distinguished between “performative” and “constative” utterances, the former of which perform the action to which they refer and the latter of which make assertions that can be judged as true or false. Modern philosophy has treated the constative as the norm, and performatives, if considered at all,…
How did the linguistic theory of Saussure become a model for anthropologists, sociologists, and analysts of pop culture? Jonathan Culler suggests that this move rests on “two fundamental insights: first, that social and cultural phenomena are not simply material objects or events but objects or events iwth meaning, and hence…
Foucault, in Canguilhem’s summary, argues that an anthropologization of the sciences took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when Kantian philosophy combined with biology, economics, and linguistics to raise the question What is Man? Foucault argues: “From the moment when life, work, and language ceased to be…
Showing page 1874 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
