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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When Peter comes to the door of the house where the disciples are praying for him, they think it’s Peter’s “angel” (Acts 12:15). The thing at the door is recognizably Peter, but they don’t think it’s Peter in the flesh. It’s still the person, but not the embodied person, so…
The name John in Revelation 1:1 links the seer up with John the Baptist, the messenger who came from God to announce the coming of Christ. Some (JM Ford, Revelation (The Anchor Bible, Vol. 38) ) have suggested that this points to John the Baptist and his circle as the…
Cyril O’Regan ( Theology and the Spaces of Apocalyptic , 60)summarizes Bulgakov’s cautions about turning justice into the master theme of Christian witness. Bulgakov is “sensitive to the horrors that have been committed in the name of justice throughout history and proximally in the Russian Revolution. The thirst for justice…
Liberal Protestants and orthodox Protestant both tell the story of modern Protestantism as the opposition of liberalism and orthodoxy. Already in the 19th century, FC Baur doubted this scheme, and suggested there was a third form of Protestantism - a gnostic Protestantism. Cyril O’Regan’s Gnostic Return in Modernity is the…
Jenson makes the remarkable claim that God is Himself culture (in a contribution to God, Truth, and Witness: Engaging Stanley Hauerwas , 160-1): “What it is to be God is given in the Father’s eternal begetting of the Son and enlivening through the Spirit, in the Spirit’s eternal liberating of…
Joshua Davis gives a deft summary of J. Louis Martyn’s understanding of Pauline theology in the introduction to Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology: With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn , which Davis co-edited with Douglas Harinck. Building on but going beyond Kasemann, Martyn attempts to reconstruct Paul’s doctrine of…
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