Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In a brief article entitled, “The Theology of Old Testament Sacrifice," Gordon Wenham, expanding on a comment about ritual from anthropologist Monica Wilson, states: We resort to ritual when we want to express our deepest feelings. Consider the rituals used in greeting people in our society: a nod, a handshake,…
Everyone here in Cambridge is talking about sacrifice. My supervisor, Dr. John Milbank, is working on a book on gift in which he is dealing with recent literature on sacrifice. The graduate seminar in Systematics during Michaelmas Term focused on the theme of sacrifice. The first presenter was Dr. Ian…
Protestant-Catholic debates about the sacraments have usually taken the form of debates about sacramental efficacy. Protestants claim that Catholics believe that sacraments work ex opere operato , virtually a magical view of the sacraments. A priest goes through the motions and says the hocus-pocus and "presto!" the sacraments confer grace.…
When Israel came out of Egypt, she was a collection of tribes descended from the Tribe of Abraham. Tribalism drops out of history into the "world" by looking back to ancestors and by orienting to the spirits that govern the world. The world must not be manipulated, because to do…
Angels are the mediators of the Old Creation, as Eugenio Corsini has rightly pointed out in his commentary, The Apocalypse. For this reason, argues Corsini, the book of Revelation must have to do with the final end of the Old Creation order, which he associates with the work of Jesus…
Our procedure in "Through New Eyes Volume 2" thus far has been to lay out the general overview of history and its meaning as the Bible presents it. My hope is to fill this out in four major sections, corresponding to the four ages and the four testaments in the…
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Milbank charges that modern theology is characterized by false humility. Barth agreed with respect to Christology. In the name of a humble refusal to penetrate the veil of mystery around the incarnation, modern theologians have often renounced “beforehand all serious and responsible inquiry for the truth and every attempt to…
Barth ( CD 1.2) defends the church father’s from Herder’s charges of intellectualism and scholasticism. He sees two objections in Herder’s complaint: a “formal” objection to the meticulousness of patristic Christology, and a “material” objection that the fathers’ categories, especially that of “nature,” turned the incarnation and salvation into a…
When we read that ancient tyrants hired magicians to perform haruspicy with the entrails of dismembered infants, we immediately discount the record as propaganda. We know without needing to investigate that similar accusations against Jews in the Middle Ages had become a topos of anti-religious rhetoric. I’m not saying we…
Siloam was a pool (John 9), but Siloam also had a towner (Luke 13:4). That enhances the Edenic setting of the story of the man born blind in John 9. He is not only sent to wash in the water, he is sent to wash in the water by the…
Hamann suggests that the fear of God is what energizes: “When one considers how much strength, presence of mind, and speed, off which we are otherwise incapable, the fear of an extraordinary danger inspires in us: then one can understand why a Christian is so superior to the natural, secure…
Hamann hoped for a natural theology that would lead not to “the God of naked reason” but to “the God of Holy Scripture, who would show us that all [nature’s] treasures are nothing but an allegory, a mythological painting of heavenly systems - just as all historical events are the…
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