Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
When Samuel saw Saul, Yahweh answered him, "Behold, the man of whom I spoke to you! This one will restrain My people" (1 Samuel 9:17) Many English versions of 1 Samuel 9:17 read, "This one will rule over My people," but that is a mistranslation. The Hebrew verb is `atsar…
We have arrived at the tentative date of A.M. 3474 for the decree of Cyrus, and we have determined to operate as if the 70 weeks of Daniel 9 are literal years. We also decided that Messiah the Prince arrives at the beginning of the 70th week, after the 69…
The book of Proverbs appears as a largely random collection of aphorisms drawn from experience saturated in law. Despite its random arrangement, however, the book does have an over-arching structure that reinforces its main themes. One way to gather clues regarding the structure of a biblical book (or any book)…
I recently had the privilege and pleasure of reading the first draught of Gary North’s Economic Commentary on Leviticus , which will be out some time next year. Gary’s comments on Leviticus 27 were stimulating, and caused me to take another look at the passage. The results, which I sent…
As we have seen in this series, each time there is a new covenant, there is a break in the year-by-year chronology. At the same time, each time the break is crossed by information provided in the text. Thus, the year-by-year chronology breaks down at the birth of Abraham, but…
The Openness of Literature Let’s discuss literature for a moment. There are two ways a story or novel can close. The first is called poetic justice. When a story ends with poetic justice, the bad guys are all punished and the good guys are all rewarded. This kind of story…
Showing page 287 of 309
Showing page 5 of 43
Bauerschmidt notes that Aquinas frequently argues, especially when speaking of the incarnation, not for “proof” of doctrine but for its “fittingness.” Reason has the role of “manifesting how [the incarnation] fits together (convenire means literally ‘to come together’) with other things that Christians hold true about God.” Perhaps this can…
In Epistle 137, Augustine writes: “The Christian teaching nowhere holds that God was so poured into human flesh as either to desert or lose - or to transfer and, as it were, compress within this frail body - the care of governing the universe. This is the thought of people…
Commenting on ST I-II, q. 109, Frederick Bauerschmidt says that Thomas uses the word “merit” analogically when we speak of God rewarding human action “since we can act in the first place only because God has given us the capacity to act.” This applies even to Jesus: “even when Thomas…
Seneca suggests that ingratitude is the worst of vices, and nothing is more “harmful to society” than ingratitude (I.1). Later in Book I, he lists a series of moral ills that plague society – “homicides, tyrants, thieves, adulterers, ravishers, sacrilegious, traitors” – but concludes that “worse than all these is…
I am grateful to Ralph Smith for references to Frances Yates’ work on Shakespeare’s plays. In an analysis of The Tempest, Frances Yates writes: “It is inevitable and unavoidable in thinking of Prospero to bring in the name of John Dee, the great mathematical magus of whom Shakespeare must have…
Educated Elizabethans lived in a world of similitudes. As EMW Tillyard argued, the Elizabethan world picture was constituted by a series of analogous chains of being. The social world manifested and was manifested by the natural world; the universe as a whole resembled human beings; there was a hierarchy among…
Showing page 1867 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
