Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. Whoever hits you on the cheek, offer him the other also; and whoever takes away your coat, do not withhold your shirt…
Part 5: Laying New Foundations in a Dying World As I mentioned above, the history of Israel involved several centuries as a church-without-a-culture, and then several centuries as a culture-without-a-city. To be sure, there was an informal culture around the church of the Patriarchs, but the civilization of free farmers…
In the Reformation Tradition we baptize both professing believers and their children. In the case of infants it is now commonly insisted that this is done because the children are already in covenant with God. Baptism is a sign and seal of a previously existing reality. Despite the popularity of…
Concerning Sex & the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper Is not the cup of blessing which we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the loaf of bread which we break a sharing in the body of Christ? Since there is one loaf, we who are many…
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 mumbo-jumbo and — presto! — the sacraments confer…
In 27.2, the Westminster Confession says that because of the “spiritual relation” between sacraments and the things they represent, “the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other.” Applied to baptism, this means that when the Bible says that we are baptized into Christ (Rom. 6), it…
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Rosenstock-Huessy strikingly sees the spirit of Francis in the person of Abraham Lincoln: “When Lincoln, as President and Commander-in-Chief of a victorious army, walked into Richmond in 1865, on foot, without escort, St. Francis had conquered the powers of this earth. In Siberia, in Egypt, people would whisper that old…
Natalie Zelmon Davis writes, “In a profound sense, the religious reformations of the sixteenth century were a quarrel about gifts, that is, about whether humans can reciprocate to God, about whether humans can put God under obligation, and about what this means for what people should give to each other.”
Few areas of theology have been as ridiculed in modern times as eschatology. Antichrists, dragons, beasts, final judgments - it’s all superlatively mythological for modern rationalists. Sometime in the early part of the twentieth century, however, New Testament scholars began rediscovering the centrality of eschatology in NT theology. For some,…
Discussing the separation of workplace and home, Rosenstock-Huessy makes the striking observation that this divide separates labor from a man’s “right to teach, once the supreme value of a master’s earthly life.”
The Protestant Reformation had well-known effects on the nuclear family, but Rosenstock-Huessy notes that a parallel movement occurred in the Roman Catholic church after 1500, when Catholics began to “lay far more stress on the cult of St. Joseph and on the conception of the Holy Family.” As a result,…
In The Christian Future , Rosenstock-Huessy again makes some passing comments about childbirth. He is talking about the character of suburban life, its ethnic and economic uniformity, its placid and indifferent external peacefulness that hides, he claims, desperate inner conflicts. For Rosenstock-Huessy, the whole situation is summarized by the fact…
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