Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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A Swiss visitor to London in 1599 saw a performance of Julius Caesar, and wrote: “On September 21st after lunch, about two o’clock, I and my party crossed the water, and there in the house with the thatched roof witnessed an excellent performance of the tragedy of the first Emperor…
According to Stephen Duffy, Philip, Chancellor of the University of Paris, was responsible for elaborating the theorem of the supernatural. He claims that during the Pelagian controversy Augustine had left various problems hanging: “How can one be bound to do something not in one’s power? Can the virtues of unbelievers…
In his 1993 book, The Dynamics of Grace , Stephen J. Duffy offers a superb brief summary of de Lubac’s thesis in Surnaturel . According to de Lubac’s history, “Neither the Fathers nor the great schoolmen ever considered a purely natural human destiny a possibility. Their focus was on one,…
On NPR this morning, Frank Deford described how, instead of bringing feminine modesty and delicacy to the world of sports as Title IX advocates might have hoped, women athletes have adopted the culture of their male counterparts. Recent hazing incidents have brought attention to a much more extensive problem. On…
Mark Karlberg charges that Francis Junius introduced a natural/supernatural scheme into the Reformed doctrine of the covenant of works. In Karlberg’s summary, “The covenant, according to Junius, was established with our first parents by God the Father in the love of his Son. It held out the promise of supernatural…
Many of the Protestant Scholastics argued that a covenant of some sort is “natural” to man, not a “supernatural” addition to a pure, non-covenantal existence. But the “natural” covenant is often distinguished from the specific terms of the covenant of works, the prohibition of the tree of knowledge. Heidegger fulsomely…
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