Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The “second Reformation” introduced Reformed liturgy and teaching into Lutheran Germany. This was seen by some as a continuation of the Reformation and a purgation of Catholic remnants. The effort to carry on “further reformation” led to disputes with Lutherans. As Bodo Nischan has put it, the hottest debate in…
In J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century , Tom Shippey observes that Bilbo is a member of the middle class, a bourgeois. Bilbo does not have any servants, but his hole is “the home of a member of the Victorian upper-middle class of Tolkien’s nineteenth-century youth, full of…
Idolatry has deprived Israel of her senses. This was one of the early messages to Isaiah (Isaiah 6). Yahweh sent him out to a people who had been deprived of their senses because of their commitment to idols. They become like the idols they serve. They still have eyes, but…
In the current climate of Trinitarian discussion concerning personhood, it's good to reach back to David Bentley Hart's treatment of the subject in his wonderful Beauty of the Infinite . Hart addresses the dangers of misreading Rahner’s rule, namely, the danger of dissolving the ontological Trinity into the economic. In…
Chris Kou is the oldest son of Chinese immigrants. Chris and his brothers run a branding and marketing business, Imagineering, in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. In his spare time, he takes online courses from Reformed Theological Seminary, and aspires to be a pastor. Chris is also one of our…
The following was delivered as the Solemn Charge and Exhortation to Theopolis students beginning the Easter term course on Architecture and Liturgical Space . As we will be reminded repeatedly throughout the week, the Bible has a lot to say about building and buildings. Long stretches of Exodus, Kings, Chronicles,…
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A fine statement from Iris Murdoch on the capacity of literature to seek and reveal truth: "I think that though they are so different, philosophy and literature are both truth-seeking and truth-revealing activities. They are cognitive activities, explanations. Literature, like other arts, involves exploration, classification, discrimination, organized vision. Of course…
Gavin Hyman ( A Short History of Atheism ) doesn't think contemporary atheists are aware of the origins and cultural conditions of their own unfaith. They suffer from "a lack of awareness of atheism’s own origins, of the historical, philosophical and cultural matrix out of which it emerged, of its…
In Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece , Rosalind Thomas surveys the current state of Homeric studies. In the background is the Millman-Lord thesis that the epics are the product of oral improvisation. Thomas discerns two schools: “On the one hand, the formulaic theory of Parry and Lord is being…
Thomas Schirrmacher ( God Want You to Learn, Labor, and Love ) outlines a Trinitarian conception of labor. Work, like all human activity, has its uncreated origin in God. We are able to work because we are made in the image of a God of labor: "In the Bible, man’s…
Robert Jenson addresses this perennial question ( Systematic Theology , 1.228-9) in a characteristically Jensonian fashion, by reminding us of the dynamics of discourse: "In all true mutual discourse . . . each must be both subject for and object of the other. As I am present to address you,…
The following was first published in 2011 at Firstthings.com . “By the twelfth century,” Christopher Page writes in his magisterial The Christian West and Its Singers (2010), “the Latin West could be imagined as a soundscape of Latin chant.” From the eighth-century alliance of Pope Stephen with the Frankish King…
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