Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Where do we go from here? Depending on one’s perspective, the American story can plausibly be interpreted in different ways. Looked at from past to present , we can see a great deal of continuity from medieval Christendom and the Reformation to America’s founding. The War for Independence, after all,…
Click HERE for Part 1 Civic Religion: American or Christian? We have already traced out the basic contours of the shift in America from an ecclesiocentric, theocratic social order to a secular one. Building on Locke and Hobbes, the Enlightenment accomplished an astonishing coup of Christendom. That victory for the…
Author’s Introductory Note: Engaging in broad historical interpretation as I am about to do is always risky. Necessarily, one “stylizes” history by simplifying, over generalizing, and stereotyping. But the narrative qualities of history are not simply due to the imposition of human rationality upon brute facts; rather history is always…
A. Repentance to life involves endeavoring to believe real hard that you’re saved. reject infant baptism. stop watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. walk with God in all the ways of his commandments. B. What is necessary so that no sinner may expect to be forgiven unless he does it? Only…
The machine works mechanically and it is flawless. Slander/libel a group of Presbyterian ministers as “Romanist” because robes and James 2 are no worse than praying to Mary or relying on purgatory to pay for unconfessed sins. Drive off anyone who disagrees. Of that number, there may be a tiny…
If we take as a starting point the Tribal / Monarchical / Empire model, we can then add to it the Late Empire Phase. The particular ‘marker sin’ of Empire is false intermarriage, which signifies pluralism and syncretism. Empires by definition are “cosmopolitan” dominated by cities, high culture, many cultures,…
Showing page 212 of 309
Showing page 1 of 43
From an article by Anselm Min. “The three Persons are thus mutually internal in the unity and totality of the divine process, of which the Father is the originating principle, the Son the pluralizing, and the Spirit the reintegrating and unifying principle, and from which none could be separately considered.…
Robert Jenson writes, “the identity of Israel’s God, his difference from other gods, is precisely that Israel’s God is not eternal in the way other gods are, not God in the same way.  That the past guarantees the future is exactly the deity of the gods, but Yahweh always challenges…
Consider the birds, Jesus said.  And the lilies. Solomon had: “How beautiful you are, my darling, how beautiful you are!  Your eyes are doves” and “Like a lily among the thorns, so is my darling among the daughters.” Jesus assures us that our Father feeds and clothes us.  He might…
Hegel wants to rebut the Enlightenment dismissal of Christianity.  He doesn’t do this by reaching back to pre-critical forms of faith, but by ingesting criticism, deconstructing traditional theology, and reconstructing what he claims is a purer form of faith.  Rowan Williams captures the reconstructive process very concisely: “from the fundamental…
It is not good for man to be alone.  Hegel says, It is impossible. “I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other.  I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other - and I am only because I have peace with myself; if I…
Summarizing “logic and spirit” in Hegel, Rowan Williams describes the pressure toward relationality that is inherent in any act of thought: “We think in relation to particulars; but we cannot, quite strictly cannot, think particulars simply as particulars, because we can’t concretely think a pure self-identity.  To think a particular…
Showing page 1339 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
