Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the November 1993 issue of Open Book Peter Leithart commented briefly on gnosticism. The film 2001 is a great specimen of gnosticism, and is worth viewing as a Sunday School project for an adult class. The author of the basic story was Arthur C. Clarke, an old-school science fiction…
Alfred Hitchcock’s earlier movies display a strongly moral, even Christian, point of view, and certainly can be enjoyed by Christian viewers. His later works, such as Psycho , The Birds , and his television series, are not as clearly moral in tone. In these later efforts, Hitchcock brought humorous or…
“What art thou, thou idol ceremony?” asked Henry V during his midnight rounds of the English camp near Agincourt. His answer was that ceremony was both nothing and everything. It was nothing in the sense that it offered no guarantee that the king would be fit for office. Contrary to…
You, however, continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of, knowing from whom you have learned them; and that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All…
My research has led me to the conviction that there are three major periods of Biblical history, which lead to a fourth. These are the Ages of the Father, the Word, and the Spirit. The First Age, that of the Father, is recorded in the book of Genesis. It focuses…
Both Bible history and the current consensus chronology of the ancient world are tied up intimately with Egyptian history and chronology. Thus, as we broaden Biblical Chronology beyond the matter of adding up numbers and try to integrate Biblical chronology with the ancient world, the place to start would seem…
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At least since the Reformation, the choices on the meaning of justification have been two: Either justification is a declaration of right standing or it’s a making-righteous (as in Bonaventure’s claim that the grace of justification purifies, illuminates, and perfects the soul). But are these the only alternatives? McGrath says…
NT Wright’s denial that justification is “entry language” is usually taken as a criticism of evangelical Protestant treatments of justification. But his denial cuts deeper: From the high middle ages, Roman Catholic theologians taught that justification was a motus from sin to grace. From Wright’s viewpoint, the Reformers agreed with…
Some of the summaries below were previously posted on my site, and are reproduced to help my students. 1) Derrida begins the book with a discussion of Jan Patocka’s treatment of the distinction between “enthusiasm” or the “demonic” and “responsibility.” The former “confuses the limits among the animal, the human,…
In his new Being with God , Aristotle Papanikolaou points to differences between Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas on the issue of divine energies. For Lossky, the doctrine of divine energies is designed to “protect the real character of communion with God” in theosis while also insisting that union with…
Thanks to my student Brent McLean for the following quotation from Schmemann’s Journals: “I reflect, while writing my Eucharist, about Communion, on the strange, mysterious alienation from it in the Church (on Mt. Athos - they didn’t regularly take Communion; in our churches, those who seek frequent Communion are held…
Stephen Jaeger’s wonderful Ennobling Love (1999) sets up some bizarre juxtapositions. On the one hand, here is Anselm of Bec writing to two novices about the join the monastic community: “My eyes eagerly long to see your face, most beloved; my arms stretch out to your embraces. My lips long…
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