Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Cornelius Van Til offered a revolutionary exposition of the Christian worldview through the lens of Reformed theology. He argued and, I believe demonstrated, that Biblical metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics mutually presuppose and include one another. Every ethical statement of the Bible — commands about righteousness — presuppose the existence and…
In the introductory portion of Deuteronomy, Moses’ last sermons to the people of Israel — people that he regarded as his own beloved children — there is a statement that may seem paradoxical to a modern reader. It invites questions and maybe even creates problems in our understanding. Here are…
In his discussion of the biblical type scene, Robert Alter speaks of the “patterns of repetition, symmetry, [and] contrast” which characterize the narratives of Scripture, patterns that give pleasure to the reader while also building up a web of meaningful connections between texts. 1 But if readers are to notice…
In 1 Timothy 2, Paul writes: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression” (1 Timothy 2:12-14). This…
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Matthew 5:5 When the above verse is read during a Lord’s Day service, no doubt, every extrovert in the room thinks to himself, “Well, that rules out me.” After all, the meek folks in the room are the ones you…
The flames of the altar tell a mysterious story beyond mere atonement. The altar was a place of union, glory, worship, love and forgiveness, laughter and tears, renewal and hope. The altar is where Israel would feast with God, sacrifice to God, worship God, confess, and receive forgiveness from God.…
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Hippolytus tells the story that Apsethus of Libya trained parrots to fly over North Africa crying out “Apsethus is a god,” and Libyans were taken in and began to offer sacrifices to him. Then a “clever Greek” caught one of the parrots, and retrained it to cry out: “Apsethus, having…
In his encyclopedic Later Roman Empire , A. H. M. Jones explains that the church after Constantine failed to transform ordinary social behavior and culture not because it was too lax but because it was too rigorist. Ordinary Christians felt they couldn’t live up to the standards, and responded by…
Michael Hollerich, who has done some superb revisionist work on Eusebius of Caesarea, explains in a 1990 article from Church History that Eusebius employed a “similar situation” form of typology that focuses on similarities rather than differences between type and antitype, and draws out the similarities in great detail. He…
Milbank, discussing the possibility of educative coercion: “although Christianity . . . certainly requires in the end free consent to the truth, it does not fetishize this freedom merely as a correct mode of approach: truth is what most matters, and moreover a collective commitment to truth, since truth itself…
Milbank notes that “science and art have always first mimed the horrors to come.” Darwinian evolution and avant-garde prepared the way, for foreshadowed, twentieth-century horrors. He asks, “what may the far more shocking interventions of 1990s art and science . . . betoken for the present century?’
Milbank opens Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (Radical Orthodoxy) with a discussion of neo-Kantian arguments concerning radical evil. In the light of the Holocaust and twentieth-century totalitarianism, they argue, the traditional Augustinian privatio is deeply inadequate. In response, Milbank relativizes totalitarianism by arguing that “European and American liberal democracy has…
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