Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry. I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you…
CS Lewis's 1948 essay on “Priestesses in the Church” strikes a reader today as simultaneously quaintly naive and trenchantly prescient. The naive part comes near the beginning, where Lewis describes the decision to take “a revolutionary step.” It would “cut ourselves off from the Christian past and to widen the…
Imagine a version of the Lord of the Rings beginning with Sauron riding into the Shire and lopping off heads in a mad search for the ring, driving Frodo to flight from the beginning, helter-skelter and harried. While, no doubt, some Hollywood exec is at this moment scrambling to reboot…
A Communist Confession of Faith states that the aim of the Communists is “to organize society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.” This aim can…
The story of the Fall enjoys a peculiar place in Christian thought. Together with the creation account in the two chapters that precede it, it is one of the few Old Testament narratives consistently to escape the relative neglect the Hebrew Scriptures often suffer. While the characters of Abraham, Moses,…
In the previous essay, we saw that fire is a work of the Holy Spirit. The two are related so closely that they cannot be separated. Now we turn our attention to the Spirit's relationship to water. Many have understood Spirit baptism to be a dry baptism, one that is…
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In his recent book on Austen Farrer ( Light in a Burning-Glass ), Robert Slocum notes that farrer recognized that human beungs are never themselves by themselves. Children are “like idiots in the cradle” who would remain so “if no one had smiled them into smiling back, or talked us…
An SBL paper attempts to apply post-colonial theory to the “Deuteronomistic” view of women as de-humanized sexualized temptresses. He of course places Deuteronomistic history late, and thus itself “post-colonial,” and he conveniently claims that any contrary evidence in Deuteronomy (eg, ch. 21). Most problematic: What does he gain with his…
An SBL paper yesterday suggested that Zechariah 9-14 forms the narrative substructure for 1 Peter. Both passages speak in terms of a new exodus, both talk about the death of a shepherd, both describe the fiery trials of the people of God as an inherent part of the exodus. Why…
Gregory Beale examined the OT background of John’s claim that “this is the last hour,” tracing it mostly back to Daniel 8-12, the only place where he could locate a combination of “last” and “hour.” He claimed that John was talking about the eschatological trial that was inaugurated in his…
Nicolae Roddy of Creighton University pointed out in an SBL paper that the Jews were not required to sacrifice to the emperor. It was a passing point, but it raises the question of why there would be such a massive difference between Christian and Jewish. Jews were just as monotheistic,…
Eusebius quotes selections from Dionysius of Alexandria’s response to Nepos’s millennial reading of Revelation. Dionysius notes that some believe that “the author of the book was not even one of the saints, or a member of the church, but Cerinthus, the founder of the sect called Cerinthian after him.” Dionysius…
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