Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
When might the Gospel according to Matthew have been written? Of course, any answer can only be speculation, but that does not mean we are reduced to groundless opinion. In this series of articles I point the way to an approach different from the general consensus among scholars today which…
In my first essay on “synopticity” I offered a rather rough definition of the phenomenon and important, though not exhaustive examples. In this essay, I want to introduce broader aspects of the phenomenon of “synopticity.” The first example that I have in mind is conventional stories, stories of different historical…
Since the judgment of Babel was followed by the initiation of the circumcision, the impending end of the circumcision in AD70 explains the significance of the first century miracle of foreign tongues. Except for a few Aramaic “teasers” in the book of Daniel, the Word of God was monolingual and…
To the best of my knowledge “synopticity” is not a word used in theology or Biblical studies, but it seems an appropriate word to describe the kind of phenomena associated with the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. These three Gospels tell essentially the same story with significant — sometimes…
Humor is a funny thing. It is altogether familiar yet also mysterious. What makes us laugh? Why do we find things funny? There are academic fields of study dedicated to discovering what makes things humorous. These academicians even have a journal entitled International Journal of Humor Research . No joke.…
Out of all the characters in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales , the Pardoner has been called the “one lost soul.” The pious Parson, who closes out the collection of tales with a sermon on the seven deadly sins and how a sinner can absolve himself of them, connects the…
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Gregory of Nyssa discerned that Arianism erred because it “defines God’s being by its having no beginning, rather than by its having no end . . . . If they must divine eternity, let them reverse their doctrine and find the mark of deity in endless futurity . . .…
My two favorite paragraphs from Jenson’s Triune Identity : “‘Out of the being of the Father’ affirms just that origin of Christ within God’s own self which Arius most feared. The phrase says that the Son is not an entity originated outside God by God’s externally directed choice, that he…
Behind Arianism, Jenson sees the typical Hellenistic desire to escape time: “what moves Arius is the late-Hellenic need to escape time, to become utterly dominant. If we are to be saved, Arius supposes, there must be some reality entirely uninvolved with time, which has no origin of any sort and…
Jenson summarizes several thread of Tertullian’s Trinitarian theology: “Tertullian’s interpretation of God was far more biblical than that of the Apologists. He explicitly distinguished the living personal God of Scripture from both the numina of the old Roman religion and the abstract deity of Hellenism . . . . So…
The basic structure of redemptive history is an exitus and reditus structure, going out from God and return to Him. For Thomas, Emery says, “The Trinitarian processions provide the doctrinal foundation of the exitus-reditus structure of the world and of history.” He quotes Thomas as saying, “Just as the procession…
RPC Hanson writes, “At the heart of the Arian Gospel was a God who suffered. Their elaborate theology of the relation of the Son to the Father which so much preoccupied their opponents was defised in order to find a way of envisaging the Christian doctrine of God which would…
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