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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So, this is a moment of dialog with myself. I have been musing on Bakhtin and Dostoevsky, so the self-division seems appropriate. I have charged that Dostoevsky’s Christ is an ineffectual liberal Christ, using The Idiot as exhibit #1. But Diane Thompson’s essay on the biblical word in Dostoevsky’s poetics…
Milbank suggests that Berkeley makes some important breakthroughs in working out a Christian understanding of language and of a creation made by the Logos (“Theological Without Substance,” Journal of Literature and Theology 2:2 [1988]). Berkeley imagines a metaphysics without substance, but, because he believes in a God who communicates in…
In his famed “culinary triangle” (see Food and Culture: A Reader ) Claude Levi-Strauss suggested a triple classification of food: raw, cooked, and rotten. Raw is the natural state; cooked is a cultural transformation of nature, and rotten is a natural transformation. Those formed the corners of a triangle. Along…
I offer a meditation on Jesus’ entry into the silence of the grave at the Trinity House site. Click here .
Jezebel and her children are ostensibly the ones who are obsessed with the “deep things ( bathea ) of Satan” (Revelation 3:24). That fits into the letter to Thyatira in various ways. For starters, Jehu accused Jezebel of being involved in sorcery (2 Kings 9:22), and the church’s counterpart to…
David Thomson (at TNR ) thinks that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death, and his legacy of acting, raises some fundamental questions about what we take as entertainment these days: “No movie actor has risked so much on despondency. This is not to say that every film star has been single-mindedly happy:…
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