Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Mystical theologians are often unguarded, extreme, un-nuanced, pressing to the edges of heresy, sometimes beyond. Still, the mystics are worthy of study. Why? Many reasons. Unlike some late medieval and post-Reformation dogmaticians, mystical theologians are often instinctively and richly Trinitarian. Historical-critical approaches to Scripture left mystical theologians virtually untouched; mystics…
Portia of Belmont is a “lady richly left,” as Bassanio says of her in the first Act of The Merchant of Venice . Plus, she’s beautiful and wise. Suitors clamber to Belmont in hope. Her father knew it would be so, and in his will set up a fairy-tale test…
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In the nature of the case, “the” Christian meditation on Deuteronomy 14:1-21 cannot be written. Meditation offers too many possibilities, opens too many doors. There is not one and only one correct set of associations for a Christian to consider when thinking of Deuteronomy 14:1-21. We could, for example, consider…
Having retold the story of the cumulative sin of Israel leading to the great atonement on the cross, Paul then reemphasizes that, just as both Jew and Gentiles were locked into sin and judgment, now they are both justified by faith: Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded.…
Deuteronomy 14 is full of allusions to events of Israel’s history and other portions of Scripture. What would an Israelite learn by mediation on these allusions? The answer, I believe, is at least fourfold. Faith, Worship, War For the ancient Israelite first hearing Moses’ sermon, or perhaps hearing it read…
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1 John 1:1-3 describes how those who never saw, heard, or handled the incarnate word of life can come to have fellowship with the Father through Jesus. First, the apostles (“we”) witnessed the Word in flesh directly. Second, they proclaim that testimony. Third, through believing their testimony, we come to…
John Kleinig suggests that Luke’s account of the Transfiguration alludes to the feast of booths: Luke “alone of the Gospel writers relates that the transfiguration occurred on the eighth day after Peter’s confession of faith (Lk 9:28). The transfiguration was the epiphany of Jesus as God’s Son. It showed Peter,…
Zygmunt Bauman, in the book mentioned above, traces the shifts in Western cultural imagination from the ancient hero through the Christian martyr, to the revival of the ancient heroic ideal in the early modern period, to our current cult of celebrity. According to Bauman, the modern hero was born “or…
An etymology of “conservative” from the online Dictionary of the History of Ideas (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/DicHist/dict.html): In Latin conservare means to protect, preserve, save; the noun of agency, conservator, appears as a synonym for the substantives custos, servator. Just as the Greek S?ter (“Savior”) was adopted from the religious realm by the…
Still on Bauman: “In most of its descriptions, modernity is presented as a time of secularization (‘everything sacred was profaned,’ as young Marx and Engels memorably put it) and disenchantment. What is less often mentioned, however, though it should be, is that modernity also deified and enchanted the ‘nation,’ the…
More on Bauman, since that last post was getting too long: Consumerism, we (especially Christians) tend to think, is driven by desire; if so, perhaps the solution is to limit or suppress desire. Bauman points out that the goal of consumer economies is to render desires irrelevant to consumption. Desires…
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