Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
Showing page 134 of 309
Showing page 1 of 43
Traveling by sea to Rome, Paul encounters a storm, plunges into the sea and then arrives at Malta.  He is an unreluctant Jonah, cross the sea westward to call a Gentile empire to repentance. But why the unusually detailed travelogue in Acts 27?  Sidon, Cyprus, Cilicia, Pamphylia, Myra in Lycia,…
Let us suppose that the Son dwells in flesh, dies to flesh, rises in Spirit, all to prepare a new humanity to receive the radiance of light within.  What might be wrong with that? One objection might be: Why does God need time to prepare a body?  As a student,…
What difference does the incarnation make?  For Athanasius, it means (among other things, of course) that grace is worked from within humanity rather than being offered extrinsically from without, as grace was given to Adam. Redemption history is a movement from extrinsic to intrinsic grace, as the Father raises Adam’s…
Levinas opposes the reduction of the Other to the Same. So, with more reason, does Athanasius: The Father and Son are not one in the sense that “one thing is twice named, so that the Same ( ton auton ) becomes at one time Father, at another time His own…
Chee-Chiew Lee has an interesting article on the phrase “company of nations” in Genesis 35:11.  She links the promise that Jacob will become a company of nations to the promise that Abraham would be a father of many nations in Genesis 17:4-5.  But 35:11 adds an important gloss to the…
Peter Singer ( Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) ) gives a neat summary of the paradoxes of desire in Hegel: “Desire appeared as the expression of the fact that self-consciousness needs an external object, and yet finds itself limited by anything that is outside itself.  But to…
Showing page 1341 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
