Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"The faithful use of sacraments, and indeed a fully sacramental view of creation, is vital to the life of the Church. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are rites that directly shape the community and the Body, because they were given by God for that express purpose. A deficient practice of…
Weightlessness is fun. At the beginning of Gravity (2013) , we can see one astronaut dancing the Macarena and another one playing with his jetpack. They like it out there in the space. Apart from zero-gravity they can enjoy beautiful views, and even the silence is likable, although Matt Kowalski…
I recently went to a lunch that is more or less quarterly. About a dozen of us go. It is a lunch held in honor of a retired professor of religion and philosophy. I have been one of his acquaintances for more than 40 years. In his tenure as professor,…
Why Theopolis? Don't we already have seminaries and Bible colleges and other institutions for theological education? Why do we need another one? I get this question now and again. I ask myself this question even more often. What follows is a partial answer. Back in the 1990s, seminaries seemed to…
I think the logic of the Lutheran Reformation can be summarized in one sentence, attributed to Luther himself: "God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does." The first half of that statement is justification by faith . God doesn't need our works to satisfy his justice or…
If you are looking to start a fight with Christians, there is hardly a better subject to do so than the arts. Music, movies, paintings, and literature have provided no small battlegrounds for Christians to war. We are emotionally invested in the arts. A song, a book, or a film…
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Ezekiel is the only OT writer to promise a “new heart” to Israel (18:31; 36:26).  He promises hearts of flesh in place of hearts of stone.  What has given the people of Judah hearts of flesh in the first place? Ezekiel 14:1-7 gives an answer: They have set (stone -…
Near the end of his recent Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults , Christian Smith summarizes the argument of a 1995 article by N. Jay Demerath of the University of Massachusetts.  Demerath writes, that the widely reported decline of liberal Protestantism may in fact signal…
Athanasius appeals to the baptismal formula to show that the Son must be Creator: If he re-creates in baptism along with the Father, He must have created from the beginning.  But this raises the question, Is the Father insufficient in Himself?  Athanasius, strikingly, does not answer by appealing to the…
Jesus says, “Take up your cross and follow Me,” which is to say, “Be willing to die with me.”  Instead the disciples flee. But it gets worse.  The word “sword” is used six times in Matthew 26:47-56, three times in verse 52 alone.  (Otherwise, Matthew uses the word only once,…
John Milbank throws down a challenging gauntlet to Protestants in the Afterword to The Radical Orthodoxy Reader .  He explains Radical Orthodoxy as a continuation of the attack on extrinicism launched by the nouvelle theologie .  Barth, he argues following the critiques of Przywara and Erik Peterson, “ignored both the…
Bonhoeffer shows how love of God and love for His creation can be reconciled by using a musical analogy: “God wants us to love him eternally with our whole hearts - not in such a way as to injure or weaken our earthly love, but to provide a kind of…
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