Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Paradosis Center at John Brown University in Siloam Spring, Arkansas, put on its first conference last week, it was a remarkable event. It was an ecumenical conference including Orthodox (John Behr, Edith Humphrey, others), Catholic (Rusty Reno, Michael Root, others), and Evangelical (Timothy George, David Lyle Jeffrey). Unusually for…
Naphtali Meshel observes in his new The "Grammar" of Sacrifice that scholars have been talking for decades about the "grammatical" character of ritual and sacrifice in general, but have never actually analyzed a specific ritual or sacrificial system grammatically. Some even talk about a "universal grammar" of sacrifice "even though…
Some Christians are rather breezy about the problem of evil. We shouldn't be. Do I need to remind you of the grisly beheadings that have taken place over the past few weeks? Do I need to remind you of the blood of innocents that’s been spilled in our own country?…
Have you ever been to a wedding where the heavens opened and a voice declared the couple “husband and wife”? Few of us have. Beautiful as they are, most marriages are quite mundane. Yet when Jesus talks about marriage, He describes it as something that God does: “What God has…
Jesus is the last and greatest of the Prophets. He is the Prophet that Moses predicted (Deuteronomy 18). That means He gives the final word, brings the blueprints for the final temple, speaks the final world into existence, and has complete and permanent access to the divine court, where He…
Paul stands against those who are “troubling” or “disturbing” the Galatians churches ( tarasso ; 1:7; also in 5:10). The reference seems to be two great troublers from the Old Testament. First, Achan is described as a “troubler” for the problems he causes in the aftermath of the battle at…
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In a discussion of God's transcendence, Jeremy Begbie ( Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts ) observes that some accounts of transcendence leave the impression "that language is something by its very nature that God would long to escape, that something so finite and susceptible to corruption could have no integral…
In his "Person" in Christian Tradition , Stephen Hipp notes that the "originality" of Cappadocian Trinitarian theology "lies in using the word hypostasis to designate the person in distinction from the substance. The distinction between hypostasis and ousia had not been instituted during apostolic times; the Greek Fathers are the…
William Hasker ( Metaphysics and the Tri-Personal God ) cites Carl Mosser's objection to social Trinitarianism's claim that the three Persons are "distinct centers of willing": "If the divine persons cannot differ because they necessarily act in concert with one another, then attributing distinct wills is superfluous. Attributing distinct wills…
Shannon Hayes is a different kind of feminist, a feminist who has not only broken from the patriarchy but from she views as a global capitalist system that buttresses the patriarchy. She is a Radical Homemaker . She explains that “Radical Homemakers are men and women who have chosen to…
William Mann has argued that when medievals identify God with His attributes, they identify Him with "property instances," specific individuals in a relationship of instantiation with the universals that they instantiate. Jeffrey Brower ("Making Sense of Divine Simplicity," Faith and Philosophy 25: 1 [2008]: 3-30) explains, "As Mann sees it,…
Robert Tombs ( The English and Their History ) observes that many intellectuals have pondered the character of nations for the past two centuries, asking "whether nations are ancient or modern phenomena; whether they have some organic existence as cultural, genetic or geographical entities; whether they are political and ideological…
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