Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In this essay we will think about how the whole Bible is structured as one Word of God. To begin with, there is only one Bible, not two. While we divide the Bible into Old and New Testaments, that division has no more meaning than divisions into chapters and verse,…
How should one badly bruised and inadequate church relate to another? (I am not addressing the blessed possessors of absolutely perfect churches, naturally.) I believe there are three things to bear in mind. First, we must be open to the values in other Christian traditions - even Roman Catholic and…
The third and sixth day have a second creative act. Note the chiastic arrangement of the material in these special acts and the parallelism between them, see the figure below. The author arranges the description of each day as a chiasm. Each line in the chiasm is mated with a…
Now the two of them were naked, the man and his woman, and they did not sense shame (Genesis 2:25) The nakedness of Adam and Eve requires several comments. First of all, against those who think that nakedness is what God intended for humanity as a permanent estate, we have…
I’ve been reflecting on the meaning of integration, and our longing for integration in a fragmented world. I’ve been connecting my own covenant epistemology further with the thought of scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, artist Makoto Fujimura, and Classical Christian metaphysician D.C. Schindler. In my last post , and now in this…
Luke 13:31-33 is one of the strangest passages in the Gospel of Luke. It begins with a time note that sounds emphatic “At that very hour.” Then, we are told of Pharisees bringing a message that Herod wants to kill Jesus! In His answer, Jesus speaks of a three day…
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The following is an excerpt from my The Baptized Body (Canon, 2007). Protestants have always emphasized that salvation comes through faith, yet most Protestants have baptized babies. How can these two things hold together? Luther and Calvin held together their insistence on faith with infant baptism by claiming that infants…
Last week, I summarized Thomas Aquinas's argument to the effect that human beings do not create. As Thomas would have expected, there's another side to the story - a sed contra - neatly outlined by Robert Miner in his Truth in the Making . Miner agrees that Thomas denies the…
Stuart Schwartz knows that his All Can Be Saved "goes against the grain in many ways. First of all, it is an examination of attitudes of tolerance among common folk, not philosophers or theologians. Second, it deals with both the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds, which are normally treated apart" (8).…
Writing at The American Conservative , Bonnie Kristian explains why the "few bad apples" defense of American policing doesn't work. She offers seven lines of evidence to show that police brutality is systematic rather than occasional. For instance: "Only one out of every three accused cops are convicted nationwide, while…
Fintan O'Toole highlights the "border issue" that may undo Brexit. He's referring to "the question of whether a hard customs and immigration border is to be imposed between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic." It's not merely a technical question of "borders and customs, of tariffs and passports." It's fiendishly…
David Lachterman ( Ethics of Geometry ) suggests that the specific novelty of the modern age is that it doesn't regard itself as a period of history. It's instead "consummate," in two senses: "as the 'final' period which brings to a permanent close all prior epochs by exposing their imperfections…
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