Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The “second Reformation” introduced Reformed liturgy and teaching into Lutheran Germany. This was seen by some as a continuation of the Reformation and a purgation of Catholic remnants. The effort to carry on “further reformation” led to disputes with Lutherans. As Bodo Nischan has put it, the hottest debate in…
In J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century , Tom Shippey observes that Bilbo is a member of the middle class, a bourgeois. Bilbo does not have any servants, but his hole is “the home of a member of the Victorian upper-middle class of Tolkien’s nineteenth-century youth, full of…
Idolatry has deprived Israel of her senses. This was one of the early messages to Isaiah (Isaiah 6). Yahweh sent him out to a people who had been deprived of their senses because of their commitment to idols. They become like the idols they serve. They still have eyes, but…
In the current climate of Trinitarian discussion concerning personhood, it's good to reach back to David Bentley Hart's treatment of the subject in his wonderful Beauty of the Infinite . Hart addresses the dangers of misreading Rahner’s rule, namely, the danger of dissolving the ontological Trinity into the economic. In…
Chris Kou is the oldest son of Chinese immigrants. Chris and his brothers run a branding and marketing business, Imagineering, in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. In his spare time, he takes online courses from Reformed Theological Seminary, and aspires to be a pastor. Chris is also one of our…
The following was delivered as the Solemn Charge and Exhortation to Theopolis students beginning the Easter term course on Architecture and Liturgical Space . As we will be reminded repeatedly throughout the week, the Bible has a lot to say about building and buildings. Long stretches of Exodus, Kings, Chronicles,…
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I am preaching through Luke at Trinity Reformed Church, and I will be posting sermon notes at this site. Here are the notes from last week’s sermon: Things Fulfilled Among Us, Luke 1:1-56 INTRODUCTION Luke’s gospel is the first part of a two-volume work. Luke wrote his gospel to tell…
At the beginning of the worship service at Trinity Reformed Church, where I’m serving as organizing pastor, I give an exhortation. Here is the exhortation for this week: This week, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America (ECUSA) confirmed Gene Robinson, an openly…
Bruce Ellis Benson’s Graven Ideologies , a study of Nietzsche, Derrida, and Marion, confirms something I’ve suspected from my sketchy reading of Derrida. Benson says that Derrida emphasizes that all thought is set in a structure of “not yet but still to come.” This is Derrida’s famed notion that final…
I’ve been reading a good bit of Mikhail Bakhtin this summer, and have come across some pretty mind-blowing passages in his Dialogic Imagination and Rabelais and his World . The following quotations have to do with the role of humor in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The laughing, parodic-travestying literature…
Another article from Biblica , this time from 1991, on the use of ” herem ” (“the ban”) in 1 Kings 20:42, where it is part of the Lord’s complaint against Ahab after he lets Ben Hadad go free. Philip Stern argues that the author of Kings uses the word…
There’s a neat little study of 1 Kings 16:34 (Hiel’s rebuilding of Jericho) in a 1996 issue of Biblica . Charles Conroy, the author, begins with a structural analysis of 1 Kings 16:29-34. He points out that grammatically the passage breaks down into an introductory statement (29a), a summary of…
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