Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“We have a God who hides things because He loves to be sought out, chewed out and found out.” As Christians, we are rightly taught that we must not question God’s Word. The problem is that the Scriptures record many things which appear to have been given to us for…
The book of Revelation is a liturgy. John begins “in the Spirit” on the “Lord’s day” (1:10). Jesus appears, and Jesus tells him to record messages to seven churches, words of encouragement and rebuke, like the call to worship and confession at the beginning of a Christian liturgy. In chapter…
In my previous posts, I looked at the theme of creation as it is found in a sequence of psalms devoted to Yahweh’s Kingship (Psalms 93-100). Among other matters, these psalms declare that when the Kingdom of Israel’s God comes, it is the Kingdom of the world’s own Creator .…
The church in Corinth was a pastoral nightmare. Factionalism, sexual immorality, incipient syncretism, using the church as a stage for self-promotion, and denial of the final resurrection were just some of the problems. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church, he confronts each of these problems directly and in…
The first chapters of the Word of God have a poetic rhythm. This is used to discredit their accuracy as historical narrative, but the truth is that these same rhythms continue far beyond the book of Genesis. In fact, the later texts shed light on the frustratingly succinct account of…
Mr. Martian: What’s that there? Mr. Edison: (Edison holds up a standard, 60 watt lightbulb). It’s a lightbulb. Mr. Martian: A “lightbulb” you say? What exactly is a “lightbulb”? Mr. Edison: A lightbulb is an object used to illuminate a dark area, say a room. It’s made primarily of filament…
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Plays might be promoted as a kind of opiate of the masses: Mass entertainment that keeps them from more violent entertainments like rioting and pillaging. This could be problematic, if the entertainments were too heady for most people to follow. Thomas Heywood (1612) suggested that playwrights should “ayme . .…
How regulated was Shakespeare’s own theater? And for what reasons? Patterson highlights various reasons for closing or permitting theaters: audience composition, including the fear that a large collection of workers might be distruptive; public health; economic concerns; religious and moral concerns, especially Sabbatarian; and “a shifting and elusive imperative to…
Shakespeare’s fortunes in the US were, understandably, different from in England. Initially, Shakespeare was America’s most popular playwright, appealing to a wide sector of the American populace. Patterson notes that “by the end of the nineteenth century ‘Shakespeare’ had become a cultural icon, the property only of the ‘legitimate theater,’…
Annabel Patterson notes ( Shakespeare and the Popular Voice ) that contemporary critics, whatever their own political outlook, assume that Shakespeare was an advocate of Elizabethan hierarchy. This view, however, is a product of the 19th century. Dryden, Johnson, and others criticize Shakespeare for violating the conventions of his genre,…
By the 18th century, acting styles also invested Shakespeare with “courtly” virtues of control, dignity, stateliness. Dobson writes, “Shakespearian acting . . . in the decades following Betterton’s death in 1710, seems to have settled into a grandiloquent vein of static declamation, best exemplified by the stout James Quin (1693-1766)…
Dobson again: “after Charles II’s death in 1685 England would never again have another monarch with such an informed interest in the drama (or, mercifully, such a lascivious one), and deprived of royal patronage and protection the playhouses came under renewed attack from the moralists (led by the redoubtable clergyman…
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