Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Understanding Shakespeare’s Biblical references is vital for the interpretation of many, if not all, of Shakespeare’s plays. For Othello , it is especially important, not only because the interpretation of the play is contested among various approaches — feminist, homosexual, post-colonial, Marxist, Freudian, new historical, and others — but also…
Mike Allen of Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, scores some points in his review of The End of Protestantism . He lodges the fair complaint that my rhetoric sometimes outruns my evidence. He argues that more stress on the present reality of the church’s unity deepens the tragedy of division; divisions…
I begin with two observations. First, on any millennial view, the Christian account of history is progressive, moving from the garden to the city. It is eschatological not only in that there is an end, but that the end is a glorified beginning, not merely a return to origins. To…
The church is a new form of polity that erupts into the world as much as the Son of God comes into the world. It’s a real-world political alternative to the polities of the ancient world. It resolves many of the political dilemmas of the ancient world, though not simply…
In my last post , I explained how Baptists really have a “one-ordinance-one sacrament” ecclesiology. I said this: “what Baptists really believe, in modern parlance, is that there is one ordinance (baptism which is a sign or symbol only) and one sacrament (the Lord’s Supper in which feeding upon Jesus…
One of the most extensive and penetrating responses to the Yoder-Hauerwas attack on Constantiniansm is found in Oliver O’Donovan’s Desire of Nations , in a chapter entitled “The Obedience of Rulers.” O’Donovan defines the word “Christendom” as “a historical idea,” specifically “the idea of a professedly Christian secular political order,…
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We can’t all see exactly the same thing at the same time. No matter how close I press toward someone else, the perspective of my eyes is never identical to the perspective of another person. We cannot see through another’s eyes. Sight is an individualizing mode of knowledge. Hearing is…
In Bed and Board , Robert Farrar Capon points out how disordered sexual relations are deeply engrained in contemporary life. Capon wrote the book 40 years ago, but what he says is more true today even than it was then. Men, he says, “come to marriage after years of being…
Mark Edmundson examines the pervasive influence of Gothic themes not only in popular entertainments (horror movies, computer games, etc) but also in contemporary real-life life. He suggests that the evening news presents a Gothicized world, a world of unknowable threats and horrors that we cannot escape. Writing in the late…
Hamann allegorized a hermeneutical principle of Jer 38: “We all find ourselves in such a swampy prison as the one in which Jeremiah found himself. Old rags served as ropes to pull him out; to them he owed his gratitude for saving him. Not their appearance, but the services they…
Hamann allegorized a hermeneutical principle of Jer 38: “We all find ourselves in such a swampy prison as the one in which Jeremiah found himself. Old rags served as ropes to pull him out; to them he owed his gratitude for saving him. Not their appearance, but the services they…
Still on Pickstock on Derrida. Famously, Derrida says that speech dies with its author, the sound fading on the air. Writing survives. But he claim that speech is always under erasure makes the prior assumption that death and life are mutually exclusive territories, that it is impossible for the sign…
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