Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The corona virus hit Western society like a Biblical plague — almost. Biblical plagues were actually much more devastating. Still, as Peter Leithart describes the present situation, it is a judgment from God, because the disease itself together with our political solutions brought about a social situation that fits Deuteronomy’s…
“The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t affect anything, don’t mean anything. What makes anyone think that ‘theology’ is a subject at all?” - Richard Dawkins One cannot be a Christian college president or seminary trustee (your essayist is both) without wondering if Richard Dawkins’s notorious take-down of theology…
Nearly every church that I am aware of has adopted differing practices since the recent virus scare began. Some churches continued to meet during the state lock downs, and other churches left their building empty, meeting online through various video conference technologies. Some churches have gone back to life as…
Fear is an inseparable companion of human life. We are afraid of illness and death, poverty and cataclysms, rejection and betrayal, failure and shame. We are afraid of the unknown, so in a sense we are afraid of the future and life itself. Unless we live in the illusory belief…
In the title above, I put the word “heresies” in quotation marks because I would prefer that the word “heresy” be confined to erroneous beliefs about the Trinity and the Person of Christ, rather than be used broadly to describe any view that might be considered an error. 1 At…
I’ve been trying to work out why I’m feeling existentially disconnected from CoV-19-related fears. I’m taking it seriously, but it’s not registering in any deeply personal way. Partly it’s that my routines are largely undisrupted. But as I reflect on people’s reactions I think there’s more, because a lot of…
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Seizing power doesn't make a revolution. When you seize speech, then you've got a chance at total revolution. Writing of the French Revolution, James Billington writes ( Fire in the Minds of Men , 34-5), " four-letter outbursts of the youthful demonstrators in the late 196os echoed the political shock…
You could find anything in the cafes of the Palais Royal in the last decades of the eighteenth century: "Distinctions of rank were obliterated, and men were free to exercise sexual as well as political freedom. In the course of a single visit, one might sip such libations of liberation…
Toward the end of Corpus Mysticum , Henri de Lubac says that one of the most serious results of the shifts in Eucharistic theology he examines is "the devaluation of symbols." Augustine's entire theology was about "signs" and "things." In the late Middle Ages, "consideration of 'signs' would soon suffer…
"In the summer of 1789, absolute monarchy and aristocratic authority were overthrown forever in the most powerful kingdom," writes James Billington in Fire in the Minds of Men (20). If something happens, it must be possible. Just so: The French Revolution was "the hard fact that gave birth to the…
Josiah's death is a reverse exodus because it's first an inverted Passover. Zechariah describes a scene of mourning like the “mourning on the plain of Megiddo,” a reference to the death of Josiah (Zechariah 12:11). But the mourning Zechariah describes is also like the mourning of Egypt over their firstborn.…
Was the American Revolution a Revolution? Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (ERH) concludes it was a “half-revolution” rather than a total revolution on the scale of the Russian, French, Puritan, Reformation, and Papal revolutions. Evaluating the revolutionary character of the American Revolution rests partly on the question of what “revolution” meant to the…
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