Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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Advent is the season of coming, since we commemorate the coming of God’s Son in flesh. Advent is just as much a season of giving, since we glorify the God who so loved that He gave. Distorted as it can become, Christmas giving is a profoundly right way to celebrate…
Trinitarian musings arising from some private discussions with a group of friends. (Note: this is a revised version of my original post). According to classic Trinitarian theology, will is an linked to nature and, since there is a single divine nature, there is also a single divine will. That’s true;…
Paul’s announcement of the reign of grace seems innocuously theological. But there was already supposed to be an age of grace operating in the first century, inaugurated by the divine benefactor, Augustus Caesar. James Harrison ( Paul’s Language of Grace in Its Graeco-Roman Context (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament 2,…
In a 1999 article in Neotestmentica , Stephan Joubert observes that Paul teaches that God’s grace enables the Corinthians to experience autarkeia , “self-sufficiency” (2 Corinthians 9:8). The word is a common one in Stoic ethics, describing the placid contentment of the sage regardless of the external circumstances. Joubert thinks…
In his classic study of The Search for the Perfect Language (The Making of Europe) , Umberto Eco summarizes Dante’s proto-Chomskyan argument about the effects of Babel on the forma locutionis , the innate grammar with which Adam was created. Eco says, “It seems most likely that Dante believed that,…
Every year, one of my students presents on a section of Calvin’s Antidote to the Council of Trent , and I’m impressed again with how Calvin responds to Trent’s claims about baptism. The first decree of the fifth session includes this statement: “Whosoever asserts that this sin of Adam, which…
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