Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Stories, frankly all human stories are practically always about one thing aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death. . . . “There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that happens to man is ever natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must…
Matthew is organized around 5 discourses, which trace out the history of Jesus as a recapitulation of the history of God and Israel in the Old Testament. Jesus first speaks as a new Moses, instructing His disciples on a mountain about a righteousness that surpasses the righteousness of the scribes…
The fall of the Sethites in Genesis 6 is the third fall of mankind, or the third degree of Adam’s original fall. Adam sinned in a Garden against his Father by stealing something he was supposed to wait to obtain. (“Every tree shall be food for you” Genesis 1:29.) Cain…
The recent fantasy film Noah and a slightly related blog comment by my friend Douglas Wilson have stirred up again the question of whether the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 who married the “daughters of men” were fallen angels or the priestly line of Seth. Doug argues for angels,…
The prophecy of Jude concerns apostasy. An illustration of apostasy and its consequences is found in verse 6, which the New American Standard Bible translates this way: "And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for…
At His death, Jesus is surrounded by a Roman centurion and his cohort of Gentile solders. Matthew doesn't say that any disciples are there. But women are, and so is Joseph of Arimathea, identified as a “disciple” but, as John tells us, a “secret disciple for fear of the Jews,”…
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In an article from the 1950s, Paul Kristeller traced the development of the system of the fine arts that everyone since at least Kant has taken for granted. He notes that this system, which considers some specific endeavours as “fine arts” separated from mere “crafts” or “artisanship,” was given a…
De Certeau suggests that Cusa’s Germanized Latin provides a linguistic illustration of his theory of the “coincidence of opposites”: “Germanisms haunt his Latin. They are the ghosts of a particular place (Rhineland, or Germany) in a different place, Latin, a language supposed to be ‘universal’ but in fact limited to…
Steven A. Walton provides an illuminating summary of the scholastic incorporation of mechanical arts into philosophy and theology. John the Scot first used the term artes mechanicae in the ninth century, and monasteries preserved and improved upon ancient technologies, but “they did not warrant inclusion in the philosophical canon.” Most…
In his treatise De Venatione Sapientiae , Nicholas of Cusa explained the Platonic doctrine of ideas as follows: “Ideas are not separated from individuals in such a way as to be extrinsic exemplars. For the individual’s nature is united to the Idea itself, from which it has all these [endowments]…
A friend, Jim Rogers, sends along this quotation from the late Richard Neuhaus: “Scholars generally agree that in the first century there were approximately six million Jews in the Roman Empire . . . That was about one tenth of the entire population. About one million were in Palestine, including…
Wow. That’s my initial reaction to a quick perusal of the opening chapters of Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul , just out from Eerdmans. Campbell attacks what he calls the “foundationalism” and “contractualism” that undergird “Justification theory” as it has been understood…
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