Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The book of Isaiah has a very brief introduction, one verse, and then plunges into a searing indictment of the people of Judah and Jerusalem. They are sons who do not honor their father, worse than donkeys and oxen who at least know their master. They are a bruised and…
This is the third of a three-part essay. The Literary Reader As a conclusion to this essay, I want to make some observations that grow out of C. S. Lewis’s remarkable Experiment in Criticism , mentioned in an earlier installment. What Lewis is interested in doing is coming up with…
Metropolitan Manifesto, the new work from Theopolis fellow Richard Bledsoe, and first "Theopolis Books" release, is out today! Head over to the Athanasius Press website to get a copy. Half the world's population now lives in cities, and that is where the Church must learn to serve. Rev. Richard Bledsoe…
This is the second portion of a three-part essay. Learning to Read Learning to read the Bible is easier said than done, of course. There are several reasons for this, and they all have to do with the art of reading. Reading is an art and not a science, and…
“It instilled a real and abiding change in the way I understand my life as a disciple of Jesus Christ,” said Clint Hail, a Community Development Coordinator out of Dallas who attended Theopolis’ course on Mission to the City . “The course renovated the way I understand the challenges facing,…
What does it mean to read the Bible as inspired literature? The method is not new nor is it uncommon in Dutch Reformed circles. Exegesis must be Christocentric, plenary (all the text serves a theological purpose), respect the context in God’s redemptive plan, and plumb the full literary depth of…
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In the Greek text of Ephesians 2:8, the statement “and this not of ourselves, it is the gift of God” is chiastically structured. A wooden translation is: “and this not out of ourselves, of God the gift,” with the EX HUMON (“out of ourselves”) chiastically matching the genitive THEOU (“of…
Here’s a summary of part of Milbank’s critique of Derrida (from Theology and Social Theory , pp. 307-311). Derrida attacks Western metaphysics by focusing on the attempt to separate a “meaning” out from the “play of signs.” In most Western systems, this meaning is associated with an original meaning that…
A note against empiricism: Derrida quotes Scheler (in his essay on Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics”) to this effect: “I see not only the eye of an other, I see also that he looks at me.” That is, what is seen is not only a thing, a dead object, but also…
Levinas claims that an absolute other must necessarily be invisible. If the other is visible, I can at least “capture” and “grasp” and “encompass” him in my gaze, which is the first moment in a sequence that could lead to capturing, grasping, and encompassing and dominating him in other ways.…
Yeats said that the classical world was fundamentally tragic, with the Oedipus myth as the founding myth — the man kills his father and marries his mother. Yeats would have been better off pointing to the myth of Zeus, for that truly is the founding myth of the Olympian order,…
In his history of the ancient concept of progress, E. R. Dodds says that one fundamental limitation on the idea of progress was imposed by the theory of Forms, both in Platonic and in the Aristotelian version. For Plato all progress consists in approximation to a pre-existing model; the model…
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