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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Gatekeepers

1 Chronicles 9:1 seems to bring the genealogies of 1 Chronicles to an end. The Chronicler has recorded the genealogy of the human race from Adam, focusing on the descendants of Abraham through Jacob. Summing it all up, he says, “So all Israel was enrolled by genealogies; and behold, they…

by Peter LeithartJune 21, 2016
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Trinity

Are the Divine Persons Persons?

The “personalist” understanding of the Trinity, articulated most influentially in the work of John Zizioulas, has fallen on hard times. Recent scholars have attacked Zizioulas’s idea that Cappadocian Trinitarianism represented an ontological revolution, hammering on the distinction between divine and human personhood. Michel Barnes’s conclusion is the most drastic of…

by Peter LeithartJune 16, 2016
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Architecture

On Biblical Theology

Biblical Theology is often defined as the historical unfolding of God’s revelation, or of God’s revelation and of the history of his covenantal redemption and transformation of humanity and the world. In practice, Biblical Theology is usually broader than this, and also includes the study of literary structure and of…

by James B. JordanJune 14, 2016
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Humor

Wise Laughter

We are made to be happy. Created to enter into the eternal joy of God, our whole being inclines to that end, but the fallen world has put forth barriers and by our own sin we bar ourselves from that endless delight, and death blinds us to that reality. Yet…

by Remy WilkinsJune 7, 2016
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Liturgy

Why Theopolis? Take Two

At the end of Revelation, John sees the heavenly city descending to earth. The city shines with the brilliance of God's glory, which lightens the nations, so that kings bring their glory to the city. This is not a vision of the final new heaven and new earth. It's a…

by Peter LeithartJune 2, 2016
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Attributes of God

How Can We Talk About God?

“No one has ever seen God,” writes John (John 1:18). If this is the case, then how can we speak about God? Some people say we actually cannot. Or at least we cannot speak about God positively, i.e. who He is. We can only say who or what God is…

by Bogumil JarmulakMay 31, 2016

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Exhortation

When John first talks about sin, he connects it to fellowship and walking in the light. He does not say, “If we walk in the light, the blood of Jesus cleanses us, and as a result we have fellowship with one another.” He says, “If we walk in the light,…

October 1, 2006
Economics

Bakhtin the capitalist

Stallybrass and White critize Bakhtin for conceptualizing the fair purely as a place of communal celebration, ignoring the commercial activities of the fair: “In developing this concept, Bakhtin succumbs to that separation of the festive and the commercial which is distinctive of capitalist rationality as it emerged in the Renaissance.…

September 29, 2006
History

Classical bodies and modernity

Stallybrass and White again: The classical form “was far more than an aesthetic standard or model.” It might be better to say that there was a classicist aesthetic at work in other areas besides art. In any case, the classical body “structured, from the inside as it were, the characteristically…

September 28, 2006
Art

Classical and other bodies

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White ( The Politics and Poetics of Transgression ) summarize a point from Bakhtin: “Bakhtin was struck by the compelling difference between the human body as represented in popular festivity and the body as represented in classical statuary in the Renaissance. He noticed how the two…

September 28, 2006

Humilation and Exaltation

Theologians normally treat the incarnation-to-burial of Jesus as the humiliation of the Son; resurrection-to-ascension exaltation. That’s correct, but there are other angles too. God hid His face behind a veil from the time of Moses to the incarnation. This is His humiliation - we might almost say, a display of…

September 28, 2006
Literature

Metaphysical Hamlet

Andre Gide wrote: “Has anyone, in explaining Hamlet’s character, made full use of the fact that he has returned from a German university? He brings back to his native country the germs of a foreign philosophy; he has plunged int a metaphysics whose remarkable fruit seems to me ‘To be…

September 28, 2006

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