Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In a brief article entitled, “The Theology of Old Testament Sacrifice," Gordon Wenham, expanding on a comment about ritual from anthropologist Monica Wilson, states: We resort to ritual when we want to express our deepest feelings. Consider the rituals used in greeting people in our society: a nod, a handshake,…
Everyone here in Cambridge is talking about sacrifice. My supervisor, Dr. John Milbank, is working on a book on gift in which he is dealing with recent literature on sacrifice. The graduate seminar in Systematics during Michaelmas Term focused on the theme of sacrifice. The first presenter was Dr. Ian…
Protestant-Catholic debates about the sacraments have usually taken the form of debates about sacramental efficacy. Protestants claim that Catholics believe that sacraments work ex opere operato , virtually a magical view of the sacraments. A priest goes through the motions and says the hocus-pocus and "presto!" the sacraments confer grace.…
When Israel came out of Egypt, she was a collection of tribes descended from the Tribe of Abraham. Tribalism drops out of history into the "world" by looking back to ancestors and by orienting to the spirits that govern the world. The world must not be manipulated, because to do…
Angels are the mediators of the Old Creation, as Eugenio Corsini has rightly pointed out in his commentary, The Apocalypse. For this reason, argues Corsini, the book of Revelation must have to do with the final end of the Old Creation order, which he associates with the work of Jesus…
Our procedure in "Through New Eyes Volume 2" thus far has been to lay out the general overview of history and its meaning as the Bible presents it. My hope is to fill this out in four major sections, corresponding to the four ages and the four testaments in the…
Showing page 273 of 309
Showing page 43 of 43
“Classic theories of modernization, from the 1950s,” write the editors of Reflections on Multiple Modernities , “identified the core of modernity, of modern social structure, as the decomposition of older ‘closed' formations and . . . of the growing potential for social mobilization, and the concomitant development of new structural,…
In a 2009 University of Michigan dissertation, Richard Persky explores the cultural meaning of time in ancient Greece, focusing on the concept of kairos . According to Persky, “a kairos is a moment of opportunity, the right time to do some particular thing. The allegorical sculpture made by Lysippos and…
Jerusalem descends from heaven a jeweled bride, with the luminosity of a precious stone, a “crystal-clear jasper” (v. 11; hos litho iaspidi krustallizonti ). She is also surrounded by a jasper wall (v. 18). How might the city be related to the wall? The structure of 21:18-22 gives us a…
In the Weekly Standard , Paul Cantor explains that both Shakespeare and Cervantes aimed their writing at a common target: Chivalry. He describes chivalry as “a noble ideal and at its best it did much to refine an otherwise coarse and brutal world, but it rested on shaky foundations and…
Susan Holman ( The Hungry Are Dying ) draws on recent scholarship to argue that “food doles, communal religious feasts, public works, or subsidized public entertainment prior to the Christianization of Graeco-Roman culture did not function out of any concern to alleviate poverty per se.” These “public works” or leitourgia…
Peter tells us that Jesus was the “just” man who suffered for the sins of the “unjust,” and that the purpose of this suffering was to “bring us to God.” William Dalton ( Christ's Proclamation to the Spirits ) points out that the verb prosago has technical legal meaning in…
Showing page 294 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
