Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I was still a high school student the first time I read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but I will never forget the powerful impact the book had on me. Of course, as a second year student, I did not fully digest the book. In spite of subsequent readings, I…
Crises force questions of identity. Identities may remain assumed until some event, or series of events, challenge what may have been taken for granted. The search for identity is an anxious one precisely because it tends to happen in times of upheaval and uncertainty. In his recent book, Orthoxox Anglican…
Peter Leithart recently wrote a fascinating short piece about the Half Shekel Temple Tax as an atonement. Leithart argues three main points. First that the Sanctuary Shekel was heavier, i.e., more valuable than the everyday shekel. Second, he offers some analysis about the order of magnitude of the purchasing power…
There is no denial from the careful reader that 1 Samuel 24 and 26 are telling the same story. Perhaps we should say, virtually the same story. But that the stories are cut from the same cloth is undeniable. What we have over these three chapters—1 Samuel 24-26—is a very…
In his novel That Hideous Strength , C.S. Lewis is able to masterfully illustrate in narrative form so many of his insights about the subversive dangers of Leftist political dogma to Christian civilization. Perceptive essays from Lewis like “The Abolition of Man” and “The Inner Ring” are fleshed out in…
At a very practical level, the Evangelical Church has been injected with counterfeit spiritualities. We are a people looking for a city, whose builder may only be in office for four years. Our temptation to veer to the side of the temporal is striking in our day, especially as the…
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I fell for it. Hamann begins a brief discussion of the temporality of truth apparently agreeing with Mendelssohn, “I, too, know of no eternal truths except those who are unceasingly temporal.” Stephen Dunning ( Tongues of Men ) explains the dense irony of the statement. Hamann is responding to Mendelssohn’s…
Hamann writes, “The spirit of observation and the spirit of prophecy are the wings of human genius. All that is present belongs to the domain of the former; all that is absent, the past and the future, belongs to the domain of the latter. Philosophical genius expresses its power through…
Hamann (“Metacritique”) says that “words as undetermined objects of empirical concepts are entitled critical appearances, specters, non-words or unwords, and become determinate objects for the understanding only through their institution and meaning in usage. This meaning and its determination arises, as everyone knows, from the combination of a word-sign, which…
Hamann agreed with Mendelssohn that there are “no eternal truths save as incessant temporality,” and in this he locates the difference between Judaism and Christianity: “it is solely a matter of temporal truths of history, which occurred once and never come again - of facts which have become true at…
Hamann from “Golgotha and Sheblimini”: “the entire range of human events and the whole course of their vicissitudes would be encompassed and divided into subsections just as the starry firmament is divided into figures, without knowing the stars’ number. Hence the entire history of the Jewish people, by the allegory…
Before God tells creatures to “be fruitful and multiply,” He blesses them. Blessing is a verbal pronouncement that proliferates. But so is curse: “Your sorrows will be multiplied,” Yahweh tells Eve at the gate of the garden, and later wicked people multiply on the earth, long before the righteous do.
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