Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Minister: What is the true and right knowledge of God? Child: When we know Him in order that we may honor Him. 1 Recently, a friend confessed to me a serious intellectual issue he was having that was blocking his ability to believe and trust in Christ. We talked about…
We exist to renew the church for the sake of the world. We are scaffolding to help Christians rebuild God’s heavenly city that renews the cities of men. To faithfully carry out this task, we need your help . Theopolis eats, drinks, breathes donations. A trickle of money comes in…
In March of 2022, Uri Brito, Presiding Minister of the CREC, asked Peter Leithart to address the pastors of Athanasius Presbytery. Here is what he said to these good men. Thank you, Pastor Brito. I’m honored to speak to the Athanasius Presbytery this morning. And I want to take the…
Increasingly, I have been made aware of an idea and practice floating around in Reformed circles of the need for heads of household membership in a church, with its sometimes attendant practice of “male-heads-of-household voting.” What follows are my thoughts on the practice. The Nature of Church Membership For an…
What kind of future should we expect before the return of Christ and the general Resurrection and Final Judgment? In Daniel chapters 2 and 7, we have two visions representing future history from the time that Daniel lived. Both visions give us a timeline of four successive empires that are…
In the ninth chapter of Deuteronomy, Moses recalls the journey the Israelites took across the wilderness. He reminds them of all their sins and rebellion and of God’s faithfulness to them despite their sins. When he recounts the time when Aaron led the people in the worshiping of the golden…
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Prudentius’s Psychomachia (5 th century AD) is one of the first and one of the most influential of medieval allegories. It is the source of the battle of Virtue and Vice that was one of the key themes of medieval allegory, which carries right into the Elizabethan allegory of Spenser's…
R omantic thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder, developed an organic conception of nationhood. For Herder, a nation is an extended family, and so a perfect nation, the most natural state, is “one nation, an extended family with one national character." (I rely on this essay by Richard White.) People have…
Nations are “imagined communities,” and one of the ways nations imagine themselves is to imagine themselves as very, very old. The Finnish epic, the Kalevala , serves as an illustration of the nexus between ancient literature and national identity. Anderson writes ( Imagined Communities , 74-5), “In the eighteenth century…
In a contribution to Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works Teodolinda Barolini contrasts the love poetry of Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (also known as the Canzoniere ) with that of Dante. Petrarch continues the courtly paradigm. His interest is in the shifting psychology and drama of the male…
In his E nglish Literature in the Sixteenth Century , CS Lewis makes two deflationary comments about the effects of Renaissance humanism. First, “The ‘barbarous’ books [of medieval Latin] have survived in the only sense that really matters: they are used as their authors meant them to be used. It…
Conrad Rudolph's The Mystic Ark is the product of impressive scholarship. Its focus is on the image of the mystic ark, a complex cosmic portrait showing “the Majesty” (looking like Jesus) enthroned, flanked by angels, holding a large disk, inscribed with a square turned sideways like a diamond. Inside the…
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