Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"Vanity of vanities", says the Preacher. "All is vanity". Life, we are told in the book of Ecclesiastes, is a repetitious, wearisome cycle; all that is and all that will be has already been. There is nothing new under the sun. What is crooked cannot be made straight, what is…
The Bible tells us that when God created the earth, He set up three zones of life. The first was the world itself. The second was the holy land of Eden. And the third was the Garden in Eden, God’s sanctuary. God told Adam and Eve that every tree was…
In our survey of Biblical chronology we have arrived at the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which provide chronological information for the period after the return from exile, the Restoration Period of Old Testament history. The question we begin to address in this essay is whether the Artaxerxes of these…
These verses from the Sermon on the Mount are generally taken in connection with Jesus’ earlier statement concerning adultery in the heart (vv. 27-28); the eye and the hand have obvious relevance to the sin of adultery. At the same time, most commentators admit that the principle of avoiding occasions…
17. The eye that mocks a father, And despises to obey a mother, The ravens of the valley will pick it out, And the young eagles will eat it. 18. There are three things that are too wonderful for me, Four that I do not understand: 19. The way of…
The modern Church in America and virtually everywhere else is ideology-centered, not geographical. This is because various Churches believe different things and have different customs of worship and sacraments. The ideological Church has gradually developed from the time of the Reformation, because accuracy of doctrine has become more important to…
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Polkinghorne is better when he points to the import of the remarkable fact that we can understand the inner structure of the universe: “our human ability to understand the universe far exceeds anything that could reasonably be considered as simply an evolutionary necessity, or as a happy spin-off from that…
John Polkinghorne writes that the “human writings [of Scripture] bear witness to timeless truths, but they do so in the thought forms and from the cultural milieu of their writers.” As a result, “we find attitudes expressed in the Bible that today we neither an nor should agree with.” This…
The Word became flesh. He assumed everything that flesh is heir to - all our weakness, all our sorrow, all our sickness and shatteredness, all our godforsakenness, He took to Himself. But not merely to identify or sympathize. He took it to Himself to overcome it. He goes to the…
Balthasar again: “For fundamental theology, the heart of the matter should be the question: ‘How does God’s revelation confront man in history? How is it perceived?’ But under the influence of a modern rationalistic concept of science, the question shifted ever more from its proper center to the margin, to…
Balthasar resolves the dilemma between rationalistic and fideistic approaches to faith and reason by identifying a common flaw in them, and by proposing an aesthetic solution. The common flaw, he thinks, is that both rationalists and fideists “are wont to call the historical facts of revelation ‘signs,’ and to think…
Von Balthasar summarizes Roman Guardini’s insistence that “form is not only corporeal” by saying “The eye sees the life of plants in their kind of coloration, in the manner of their movements as brought about by air and contact. The eye sees the vitality of the animal. In man, it…
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