Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
It is a well-known movie trope, the sports car drives up, a stiletto-heeled starlet steps out and the camera follows her leg up the prodigious slit of her dress, then it takes in the rest of her figure before settling on her face, usually primed and puckered for some pro-feminist…
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 again and again the distinction between divine and human personhood. Michel Barnes’s conclusion is the most…
I sit here in my office and poke around on a keyboard that is not even physically connected to my laptop and characters appear on a screen. I have a phone in my pocket through which I talk to someone around the world, send a text message, and to which…
I want to give a pep talk. Nothing fancy, nothing clever. Jesus makes some astounding promises in Luke 11. I want to clear out the clutter and convince you to believe Him and to act on it. The chapter begins with Jesus praying and teaching His disciples to pray by…
Eleonore Stump in her book Wandering in Darkness invites us to re-read the story of Lazarus (John 11) from Mary’s perspective. Stump argues that the story of Lazarus is a story of Mary, since both Lazarus and Martha are identified by their relationship with Mary. The true ending of the…
In his introduction to The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift in Honor of James B. Jordan , Peter Leithart says this about him: “Jordan is an unclassifiable thinker because he is an unclassifiable person . . . he closes his eyes in ecstasy listening to Messiaen or Rachmaninoff . .…
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Carey Ellen Walsh ( Exquisite Desire ) points to the difference between classical responses to desire and the account of desire in the Song of Songs.  Using Odysseus and the Sirens as an illustration, she notes how this scene reveals the Greek instinct that desire “harbors danger by rendering its…
Love is as strong as death.  But no stronger.  It’s a standoff. No, Jenson says: “death does not allow of stalemates.  If love binds lovers even in death’s despite, death is overcome by love.  Nor does the grave allow of partial retrievals; if it yields its prey, then its jealousy…
Barthian that he is, Jenson gets the point of the Song’s “seal on my heart” just right: Jesus’ “death has made us the seal of his identity: he dies ‘for’ us, in identification with us.  Now he is not what he is without us; he did not go into death…
Robert Jenson ( Song Of Songs (Interpretation, a Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching) ) notes that Song of Songs 8:6-7 contains “pervading reference to the myths of Israel’s religious milieu: ” Mot can indeed be translated simply ‘death,’ but it is also a proper name, for the Canaanite god…
Jealousy refers to a relentless and exclusive passion and attachment.  For Solomon, it is as hard as the grave.  Once someone goes into the grave, the grave doesn’t let him back up; once it takes hold, it doesn’t let go.  Jealousy is like that.  It is “that aspect of love…
Given the “canon” that Scripture speaks “doubly” of Christ (sometimes divinely, sometimes humanly), it would seem easy for Athanasius to shuffle passages about the Father giving and the Son receiving to the “humanity” side of things.  He doesn’t, and He’s right.  The Son has all that the Father has, and…
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