Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The translation and theology of the Hebrew term kapporet have long been puzzling to scholars. On the translation of the term, I have nothing new to offer. I wish instead to concentrate on the theological symbolism of the kapporet . The kapporet was the solid gold slab that laid "above"…
“Three lines are enough” -Rabindranath Tagore My second favorite((I frequently use the “my second favorite” as a figure of speech meaning: “here’s a good one” and to also prompt the question, “What’s your first favorite?”)) haiku was written by some internet wag: Haikus are easy But sometimes they don’t make…
The history of the Reformation couldn’t adequately be recounted without discussing the remarkable role played by the relatively recent innovations and developments in book production and printing. The printing press facilitated the rapid production and dissemination of multiple copies of pamphlets and books, which enabled the Reformers to circulate their…
As evangelicals, we’re convinced that Christ’s work is finished, complete, and utterly sufficient. For many evangelicals, this is the gospel: Nothing can take away from Christ’s work, and surely nothing can be added to it by my works or my penance, by self-denial or sacraments or sacrifice. Nothing is lacking…
Evangelicalism needs a return to formal and Biblical worship. Worship is a public act, performed on the surface of God's true altar, the world, before His throne. Man's chief end is to glorify and enjoy God, and worship is done for God's pleasure. It is man's highest privilege to dance…
The evidence of sin and its death ruling in the world is clear. Paul describes the situation vividly in the opening section of his letter to the Romans. No matter who you are, Jew or Gentile, you have the same problem: you are “under sin” (Romans 3:9). Being under sin…
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More evidence of “poesis” in Renaissance notions of human nature and “self-fashioning.” The first quotation is from Pico, and is drawn from Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century : God’s words to Adam at creation were: “To thee, O Adam, we have given no certain habitation nor countenance of…
A couple of quotations from Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning , with a comment appended. He is talking about the changing meanings of “fashion” in the English Renaissance: “In the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of a human identity as a manipulable, artful process.…
Some fun quotations from Michel de Montaigne, taken from Stephen Toulmin’s excellent Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity : “He who wants to detach his soul, let him do it. When his body is ill, to free it from the contagion; at other times, on the contrary, let the soul…
Slavoj Zizek has this to say at the beginning of his The Puppet and the Dwarf : “One possible definition of modernity is: the social order in which religion is no longer fully integrated into and identified with a particular cultural life-form, but acquires autonomy, so that it can survive…
Joel Garver helpfully explains Derrida’s deconstruction of “presence/absence” by suggesting that Derrida is attacking a particular view that assumes absolute presence and absolute absence. Either a thing is here or it is not, we instinctively thing, but in fact in all kinds of ways absent things leave “traces” of their…
Barth has a wonderful discussion of the omnipotence of God in Dogmatics in Outline (pp 48-49). He disputes the notion of absolute power, power in itself, as a description of God’s almightiness, and concludes (in line with the tradition of God’s simplicity) that God’s power is His holiness, righteousness, mercy,…
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