Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Along His journey to Jerusalem, Jesus stops frequently to have meals, three times with Pharisees (7:37-50; 11:37-54; 14:1-35). Meals were central to Jesus’ ministry. He comes “eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34). While His meals are not just for refreshment, they are opportunities for teaching the protocols of the kingdom. Meals…
Time as a realm of participation can be difficult for us imaginatively to grasp. While music is a profoundly temporal art, exploring the medium of time like no other, most of our temporal experience seems decidedly unmusical in character, disjointed and unorchestrated. The form in which we naturally discover time…
John devotes much attention to Jesus’ burial clothes. He tells us that Nicodemus brought about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to spice Jesus body, and that He was bound in linen wrappings. We find out that His body and His head were wrapped separately. (John 19:39-40; 20:6-7). When…
Thinking about time in terms of music also helps us to appreciate its unity and inner relations. Henri Bergson observes our cultural habit of dividing time into discrete moments, and conceiving of these as if akin to objects in a spatial succession. [1] Against such a notion, Bergson argues for…
As we attend to these and other aspects of music’s temporality, Begbie suggests, we will find means by which to resist some of our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing time, most especially our tendency to conceive of time as if it were a homogeneous set of technologically quantifiable units laid…
The Hidden Dimension In many fields of scientific study, the apparent complications and contradictions are dispelled once the internal logic is perceived. Biblical hermeneutics is no different, since the author of Creation is the Author of the Word. The Bible’s literary labyrinth radiates organically from an algorithm so simple it…
Showing page 133 of 309
Showing page 7 of 43
In a 2006 article in the Westminster Theological Journal , William Wilder offers a sharp interpretation of the significance of the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” and the clothing of Adam and Eve with animal skins in Genesis 3. He makes the striking point that “the most important…
James B. Jordan outlines features of the forgotten Reformation in the first of a series of essays at the Trinity House site.
Colossians 2:11: In Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ. You are circumcised, Paul says. You, Gentile Christians, who have been buried with Jesus in baptism, you are true Jews because by…
The liturgy is not all confession of sin, or singing, or listening, or eating and drinking. We can’t do all these things at once. We do one after another. The church year stretches the liturgy over twelve months. Each season has its own flavor. Lent is the confession of the…
It’s not difficult to see how allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs inspires the topsy-turvy world of Jewish and Christian mysticism. The poem speaks of the veiling of the bride (1:7; 4:1, 3; 6:7). That’s natural and literal, of course, since ancient Israelite women wore veils (Genesis 24:65; 38:14).…
In her numbing account of North Korea, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea , Barbara Demick observes that what set Kim Il-sung apart among twentieth-century tyrants was his sensitivity to the uses of faith: “His maternal uncle was a Protestant minister back in the pre-Communist days when Pyongyang…
Showing page 793 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
