Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
G.K. Chesterton assumes a surprising and memorable perspective from which to view the events of Palm Sunday (Matthew 21:1-11) The Donkey by: G.K. Chesterton When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head…
There is a common biblical principle: you must give back what you steal. In the Bible, restitution is repayment with interest. If you rob someone of their money, you have to pay back double what you stole. A thief must pay back fourfold if he steals a sheep, and if…
Identifying Isaiah’s suffering servant with the promised Messiah is unthinkable for a Jew because it combines the offices of humble priest and victorious king. While it is frustrating that Jews refuse to see the sufferings of Christ in Isaiah 53, the reluctance of Christians to interpret the passage in its…
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Psalm 150:6 (ESV) The command to praise God is pervasive throughout Scripture. In the verse above the Spirit calls all things with breath to praise the Lord. Song is also clearly featured all throughout Scripture and is a featured…
“Gender is a social construct.” That’s shocking to people who have assumed that gender and sex were synonyms but at least since I was in college, in the ‘80s, we were taught that “gender” refers to the forms, the customs, the traditions that our culture teaches us to define what…
In Genesis 49, Jacob prophesies about (blesses and curses?) his twelve sons. The first three of them don’t fare well. Jacob recalls Reuben’s offense of taking his concubine (Genesis 35:22) and the murderous violence of Simeon’s and Levi against the Canaanite inhabitants of the city of Shechem (Genesis 34). He…
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Finally getting around to Jorge Gracia’s Theory of Textuality . It’s got a lot of strengths. Gracia recognizes the strengths and weaknesses of various theories of textual meaning, and sensibly tests theories by their ability to explain our actual experience of texts. Postmodern diffusion can’t explain the fact of daily…
Considering the plural pronoun at the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer, Chrysostom says that it announces a moral and social revolution: “by this He at once takes away hatred, and quells pride, and casts out envy, and brings in the mother of all good things, even charity, and exterminates the…
Athenagoras condemns worship of the creation using a musical analogy ( A Plea for Christians ): “If therefore the world is an instrument in tune, and moving in well-measured time, I adore the Being who gave its harmony, and strikes its notes, and sings the accordant strain, and not the…
Gregory of Nyssa explains in On the Making of Man that the human body is like a musical instrument, designed for reason. This is itself a striking image, but Nyssa expounds on the analogy by looking at the specific contours of the human body. The passage reminds me of Leon…
Clement of Alexandria begins his Exhortation to the Heathen by reviewing various myths about music, and then introduces the gospel as God’s new song. By the time he’s done, he’s told the history of the world musically: “Behold the might of the new song! It has made men out of…
In his study of children’s literature ( Stars, Tigers, and the Shape of Words ), JH Prynne mounts a critique of Saussure designed to show that “the methodology of practical literary criticism habitually contradicts Saussure’s theory of language by assuming that acoustic or graphic properties of the sign do contribute…
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