Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For many people Christmas comes on December 25 and is over December 26. The tree is taken down along with the lights and the other decorations, and everyone begins setting the house in order for the new year. No more Christmas hymns. No more celebrations (well, until New Year’s Eve).…
The Ascension and the Incarnation should not be disconnected in our Christmas thinking or celebrations. As N.T. Wright notes, the ascension is "a central and vital feature without which all sorts of other things start to go demonstrably wrong. . . . where the ascension has been ignored or misunderstood,…
“In the Word was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness.” Thus John describes the incarnation of the Son. He comes as the living and life-giving light of the world. That’s good news. In the beginning, God spoke and light shone…
Christmas is all about Jesus. The angels announce Jesus’ birth, shepherds and wise men come to see Jesus, Herod wants to kill Jesus. We occasionally think of the Father who sent the Son, but we keep returning to the Son made flesh in Bethlehem’s manger. Meanwhile, as always, the Spirit…
Christmas is about many things, but one of the chief things revealed in the gospel of Christmas is the humility of God. We don't often think of humility as an attribute of God. If God is glorious and exalted, we think, He must be haughty and proud and self-centered. We…
John famously begins his Gospel with a piece of theology: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Matthew starts with a genealogy. John celebrates Advent with a hymn, Matthew with a list. For John, Jesus is the Word of creation…
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In Saving the Appearances , Owen Barfield describes the consciousness of early humanity as follows: "The human soul may be one of the 'stopping-places' for mana , but what differentiates the primitive mind from ours is, that it conceives itself to be only one of those stopping-places and not necessarily…
There is a glory of the sun, of the moon, and of the stars, Paul says. And star differs from star in glory. He's talking about resurrection, but Joel Salatin ( The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs ) wants to apply the principle to every created thing: "Glory speaks to uniqueness;…
Aristotle taught that women are defective men, with rational and moral capacities inferior to men. This is evident in generation, where the man provides the form, the fertilized seed, while the woman plays a passive role. It's sometimes argued that Aristotle's philosophy of femininity simply reflects his age, with its…
Seven times in John's Gospel, Jesus says "I am" with a predicate: 1)I am the bread of life, 6:35 2) I am the light of the world, 8:12 3) I am the door of the sheep, 10:7 4) I am the good shepherd, 10:14 5) I am the resurrection and…
The following is taken, with minor adaptations, from the introduction to my commentary on the Johannine Epistles . The gospel goes to the Jew first. When they resist, Paul turns to the Gentiles, but he hopes by this to provoke the Jews to jealousy, so that in the end Jews…
In an essay exploring (in typical Marxian fashion) the cultural effects of late capitalism (specifically on architecture), Frederic Jameson tells a fascinating story about the Rockefeller Center, drawing on Robert Fitch's The Assassination of New York . Fitch's story is about the conspiracy to change New York City from a…
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