Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Genesis 3 ends on a decisive, and decisively negative, note. Yahweh “drove the man out” of the garden, and, in addition, “at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim, and the flaming sword which turned every direction, to guard the way to the tree of life.”…
When she died in 2005 at the age of 72, Anna Haycraft, the author who published under the name Alice Thomas Ellis, was a celebrated writer in Great Britain. While working at Duckworth Publishers(which her husband owned), she produced a dozen novels, a collection of short stories, a cookbook, volumes…
Some have suggested recently that my "project" is postmodern. To clarify my views on postmodernism, I'm re-posting something I wrote in 2005, with a few modifications. For a fuller discussion, you can check out my Solomon among the Postmoderns (Canon, 2008). First, it is helpful to distinguish, as many writers…
Calling Jerusalem the "holy city" comes so naturally to Christians that it comes as something of a surprise to realize how infrequently the phrase is used in Scripture. Not only is Jerusalem rarely called holy, but in the Old Testament this classification is found only in texts that refer to…
Asking why the church doesn’t sing hymns or even why men don’t sing in church is a bit like lamenting over the lame man who can’t waltz on the dance floor. While it is a valid question, the more immediate question would seem to be, “why doesn’t the lame man…
The theme of 1 Timothy is the distinction between the true children in the Household of God and false children who really belong to the household of Satan. This is seen in the fact that in the chiastic structure of the Epistle, heresy is the subject in the center (…
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Daniel Barber ( Modern Theology ) notes that “particularity cannot be reduced to universality. Therefore we have a philosophical reason for approaching Jesus through particularity: sufficient reason, when conceived as universality, is insufficient; causal frameworks cannot negotiate sufficiently with elements of chance and contingency; ‘universality’ cannot be thought of as…
Andrew Bacevich ( The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War ) writes, “Americans in our time have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the…
Howe, again, points out that the most obvious “imperial” project in US history is the one we take most for granted, the conquest of the American continent: “it is the internal expansion of the continental USA, across the intervening hundred years, which evokes the most direct parallels with empire-building elsewhere.…
Stephen Howe ( Empire: A Very Short Introduction ) admits that nationalists in the Austro-Hungarian empire “scorned it as the ‘prison-house of nations,” and that to the intellectuals of Vienna, the empire was “a senile absurdity.” Still, “the very existence of those nationalist, cultural, and intellectual movements, able to express…
Gerald Schlabach notes that critiques of Constantinianism pose temptations of various sorts, just as Constantinianism itself does. Insofar as such critiques posit a “fall” for the church, “they tend to be dysfunctional - not just for ecumenical debate, but also for ethical discernment within those churches that historically have defined…
Travis Kroeker ( Journal of Religious Ethics , 2005) argues that Yoder is closer to Augustine than his dismissal of Augustine as a “Constantinianism” implies: “Augustine’s theological corpus is nothing if not exegetical and historical, though, of course, it is also true that Augustine freely appropriates the ‘gold and silver…
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