Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Abbreviated Introduction to the Series Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a…
Many years ago, while perusing Janice Anderson’s revised doctoral dissertation, Matthew’s Narrative Web: Over, and Over, and Over again , I was impressed by her attention to literary structures of repetition within and across Matthew’s Gospel. 1 Her research, in part, nudged me closer toward my present conviction that Matthew…
Abbreviated Introduction to the Series Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a…
“Like a lily among the thorns, so is my love among the maidens… My beloved is mine and I am his; he pastures among the lilies.” Song 2:2, 16 In chapter two of the Song of Solomon, the Beloved compares his Love to a lily among thorns. The language of…
Introduction From the very beginning, angels and animals have played mediating roles between God and Man. Just as the World was made three-tiered (Heaven, Earth, Deep), so the creatures were made (Angels, Men, Animals). Before Christ came to build the permanent bridge across the chasm between God and Man, various…
Matthew 13, the third major discourse of the apostle’s gospel, is comprised almost entirely of parables. While it may seem that all the parables serve the same purpose in fulfilling the prophet Isaiah (Matthew 13:14), the parables found in verses 44–52, at the very least, function outside that purpose. This…
Showing page 3 of 309
Showing page 1 of 43
For Thomas, the advantage of explicating the Trinity by reference to knowing and willing was that these are two human processes that remain within the soul.  They remain within the realm of praxis. Jenson notes that the great achievement of Barth’s Trinitarian theology is to start elsewhere, not with “self-contained”…
Gregory of Nyssa identifies Arianism as a form of tragic metaphysics.  They go astray because they “define God’s being by its having no beginning, rather than by its having no end . . . . If they must divide eternity, let them reverse their doctrine and find that mark of…
Is God’s being in His becoming?  We might not want to say that.  But we can’t avoid the question, if we want to continue the patristic project of “evangelizing metaphysics.” For the Greeks, Jenson writes, “Being” is “what satisfies the mind’s longing for absolute assurance, for transcendence over time’s surprises.”…
Definitely not this either: “there is properly no mutual love between the Father and Son, for this would presuppose two acts” and “within the Trinity there is no reciprocal ‘Thou.’”
Barth did not see Nazism as a reaction to or restriction on the untrammeled freedom of choice celebrated by modern liberals.  On the contrary, it was itself the product of the same “false concept of freedom” that shaped post-Enlightenment Europe. If freedom means life “in free competition of persons, systems,…
Barth argues that the Trinity is not a challenge or a qualification of monotheism, but the only true form of monotheism.  Antitrinitarianism always collapses either into the denial of God’s revelation or of God’s unity. Denial of revelation because “To the degree that it maintains the unity of God it…
Showing page 1320 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
