Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery (Revelation 12:1-2). Then Joshua spoke…
In his post asking Ought we Anoint the Dying? Peter Leithart makes an excellent and important point about our suffering as members of Christ. However, he only parenthetically mentions that the verb in question in James 5 is not chrio but aleipho . By assuming that these words are interchangeable,…
We spend a lot of time in the church talking about what it means to live like a Christian. But what does it mean to die like a Christian? If we are to follow Christ in life, what does it mean for us to follow him in death as well?…
How would one go about answering the question posed by my title? That depends on what the question means. Obviously, different definitions of the question would require different approaches to an answer. Right off hand, I can think of at least three possible — though not necessarily mutually exclusive —…
In recent weeks and months, we have seen events that are not the event. The drama around these events is not the events themselves, but the anxiety about the events, and then even the anxiety about the anxiety about the events. That is the real event. The events in Ferguson,…
Anointing the sick, including the dying, is one of the traditional seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. The Reformers denied that the rite qualified as a sacrament. Formally, this was because anointing did not have a direct authorization from Jesus; more theologically, it was not one of the marks that…
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Wes Callihan writes, in response to my brief quotation from Lucretius: “Possibly, however, Lucretius wouldn’t consider the indifferent watcher from the porch outside Pompeii a true Epicurean. Doesn’t the very next line go on to say something about how the pleasure is *not* in the other person’s suffering but in…
Isaiah Berlin’s book on Hamann is lively engaging, but Berlin doesn’t get Hamann. For instance: “Hamann’s constantly repeated point is that revelation is direct contact between one spirit and another, God and ourselves.” Not. The opposite is the case: His constantly repeated point is that God speaks to the creature…
Book 2 of De rerum natura begins with “It is sweet on the great sea to watch from the shore other people drowning.” The words were found on a wall on a house in Pompeii. Perhaps someone sweetly watched from a perch opposite Vesuvius as the lava flow swallowed up…
Athanasius ties the Arians up in knots with an order-of-decrees argument. If the Son is created for the sake of creating us, then the Son exists for our need rather than we for His sake. That suggests a particular ordering of God’s will: “It is not that God, having the…
Athanasius says that “the words of human beings do not act.” Instead, “it is not by words but by hands that a human being works, for human hands have subsistence while words do not.” Hence, he is willing to adopt Irenaeus’s notion that the Son and Spirit are the two…
Athanasius ( Orations Against the Arians ) writes that “God is not like us.” This is in the context of explaining how the eternal Word differs from the ephemeral words of human beings, and how the divine Word actually does what it says: “the Word of God is not, as…
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