Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Brian: This is, I guess, the ultimate news flash. Maybe the last one. Just a couple of minutes ago a lot of people ascended up into the air and met the returning Jesus Christ. At least that seems to be what happened. As you can see, our cameras are on…
Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who knows where mythology leaves off and history begins–or which id which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that…
One of the mysteries in Esther is why Mordecai refused to acknowledge Haman. We are never explicitly told, and such guesses as that he was continuing Yahweh’s war against Amalek do not carry weight. If such was Mordecai’s purpose he was in sin, because it was Yahweh’s war, not his.…
Below are two views of marriage that came out of an e-mail exchange. The first is a kind of of phenomenology of marriage, and of behavior within marriage. It is who we are by nature. It is bad news, very bad news. The second entry is what can be done…
The previous essay on “Monocovenantalism” brought up this matter, so a few comments here. In this area also the mindless militants have perverted the conversation. The notion that the death of Jesus was insufficient for our justification and that we must also have an imputation of His perfect life in…
Repeatedly over the last several years a variety of characters have accused the so-called “Federal Vision” of being “monocovenantal.” Many other wild and unsubstantiated accusations against the “Federal Vision” have been made, of course. Recently I learned that two of the men on the Orthodox Presbyterian Church’s study committee on…
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In the Greek text of Ephesians 2:8, the statement “and this not of ourselves, it is the gift of God” is chiastically structured. A wooden translation is: “and this not out of ourselves, of God the gift,” with the EX HUMON (“out of ourselves”) chiastically matching the genitive THEOU (“of…
Here’s a summary of part of Milbank’s critique of Derrida (from Theology and Social Theory , pp. 307-311). Derrida attacks Western metaphysics by focusing on the attempt to separate a “meaning” out from the “play of signs.” In most Western systems, this meaning is associated with an original meaning that…
A note against empiricism: Derrida quotes Scheler (in his essay on Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics”) to this effect: “I see not only the eye of an other, I see also that he looks at me.” That is, what is seen is not only a thing, a dead object, but also…
Levinas claims that an absolute other must necessarily be invisible. If the other is visible, I can at least “capture” and “grasp” and “encompass” him in my gaze, which is the first moment in a sequence that could lead to capturing, grasping, and encompassing and dominating him in other ways.…
Yeats said that the classical world was fundamentally tragic, with the Oedipus myth as the founding myth — the man kills his father and marries his mother. Yeats would have been better off pointing to the myth of Zeus, for that truly is the founding myth of the Olympian order,…
In his history of the ancient concept of progress, E. R. Dodds says that one fundamental limitation on the idea of progress was imposed by the theory of Forms, both in Platonic and in the Aristotelian version. For Plato all progress consists in approximation to a pre-existing model; the model…
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