Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Mystical theologians are often unguarded, extreme, un-nuanced, pressing to the edges of heresy, sometimes beyond. Still, the mystics are worthy of study. Why? Many reasons. Unlike some late medieval and post-Reformation dogmaticians, mystical theologians are often instinctively and richly Trinitarian. Historical-critical approaches to Scripture left mystical theologians virtually untouched; mystics…
Portia of Belmont is a “lady richly left,” as Bassanio says of her in the first Act of The Merchant of Venice . Plus, she’s beautiful and wise. Suitors clamber to Belmont in hope. Her father knew it would be so, and in his will set up a fairy-tale test…
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In the nature of the case, “the” Christian meditation on Deuteronomy 14:1-21 cannot be written. Meditation offers too many possibilities, opens too many doors. There is not one and only one correct set of associations for a Christian to consider when thinking of Deuteronomy 14:1-21. We could, for example, consider…
Having retold the story of the cumulative sin of Israel leading to the great atonement on the cross, Paul then reemphasizes that, just as both Jew and Gentiles were locked into sin and judgment, now they are both justified by faith: Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded.…
Deuteronomy 14 is full of allusions to events of Israel’s history and other portions of Scripture. What would an Israelite learn by mediation on these allusions? The answer, I believe, is at least fourfold. Faith, Worship, War For the ancient Israelite first hearing Moses’ sermon, or perhaps hearing it read…
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Would the Son have been incarnate if Adam had not sinned? 1 Corinthians 15:44-45 provides a prooftext for an affirmative answer. Verse 44 says that the “spiritual body” is implied by the existence of the “natural body.” Human beings were created in a natural state, but they were destined from…
Bishop Joseph Butler of Durham worried about the consequences of Locke’s empiricism: “That personality is not a permanent, but a transcient thing: that it lives and dies, begins and ends continually: that no one can any more remain one and the same person two moments together, than two successive moments…
Modernity ignores the social, linguistic, and political context of thought, and the way interest shapes the mind; postmodernity foregrounds all this. Perhaps, but . . . . Descartes said that his travels demonstrates that “all those who hold notions strongly contrary to our own are not for that reason barbarians…
For premoderns - ancients and medievals - there was a homology between the self and the world. Man was seen as microcosm, and, as Seigel puts it, they believed that “the world, like the self, is structured so as to fulfill intelligible moral ends.” The initial shift in early modernity,…
Seigel views with “considerable skepticism” the notion that Descartes constructed “a general theory of the human self and subject on the basis of the cogito .” In his treatise on the Passions of the Soul , Descartes claimed that the soul was linked with the body, which acts on the…
According to Seigel, “Descartes’s view of reason as most pure and solid when it was free of corruption by the world’s confusions implied nothing less than the attempt to break free of all social and cultural experience.” Not for the first time, I wish there were an anthropological history of…
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