Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Summary In what follows, I will consider the “year-stamps” employed in Scripture, i.e., statements of the form, “Such-and-such an event took place in the Xth year of Y.” In the process, I will suggest some ways in which the Biblical narrative might relate to events in the extra-Biblical world, though…
In the first essay on the parable of the Prodigal Son, I suggested that the problems commentators and others encounter in interpreting Jesus three-part parable are not accidental. These are not just problems in our ignorance of cultural background. They are intentional features of the stories —stories designed to poke…
The story of the Prodigal Son is perhaps the most well-known story in the Bible. As others have observed, it may also be one of the most misunderstood. In two short essays, I will point out features of this story that are commonly neglected, aspects of Jesus’ parable that might…
The parable of Lazarus and the nameless rich man is not an independent story. It is part of a long context that begins in Luke 15:1, where Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners and the scribes and Pharisees grumble. In response to their hardheartedness, Jesus tells a three-part…
The Bible is written so that even when a reader cannot pick up on what might be deeper or more detailed aspects of a text, there is virtually always a message to be heard. In the ancient world, where the “reader” of Scripture would likely be a church official facing…
The distinction between garden (or vineyard) and field begins in Genesis 2. This relates to the ordering of the formless world. Plants of the field are contrasted with the garden planted by God in Genesis 2:5&8. Later on, under the Old Covenant the Israelites will be required to keep their…
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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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