Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The “second Reformation” introduced Reformed liturgy and teaching into Lutheran Germany. This was seen by some as a continuation of the Reformation and a purgation of Catholic remnants. The effort to carry on “further reformation” led to disputes with Lutherans. As Bodo Nischan has put it, the hottest debate in…
In J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century , Tom Shippey observes that Bilbo is a member of the middle class, a bourgeois. Bilbo does not have any servants, but his hole is “the home of a member of the Victorian upper-middle class of Tolkien’s nineteenth-century youth, full of…
Idolatry has deprived Israel of her senses. This was one of the early messages to Isaiah (Isaiah 6). Yahweh sent him out to a people who had been deprived of their senses because of their commitment to idols. They become like the idols they serve. They still have eyes, but…
In the current climate of Trinitarian discussion concerning personhood, it's good to reach back to David Bentley Hart's treatment of the subject in his wonderful Beauty of the Infinite . Hart addresses the dangers of misreading Rahner’s rule, namely, the danger of dissolving the ontological Trinity into the economic. In…
Chris Kou is the oldest son of Chinese immigrants. Chris and his brothers run a branding and marketing business, Imagineering, in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. In his spare time, he takes online courses from Reformed Theological Seminary, and aspires to be a pastor. Chris is also one of our…
The following was delivered as the Solemn Charge and Exhortation to Theopolis students beginning the Easter term course on Architecture and Liturgical Space . As we will be reminded repeatedly throughout the week, the Bible has a lot to say about building and buildings. Long stretches of Exodus, Kings, Chronicles,…
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Thomas writes in his commentary on John that “things were written in the Old Testament because they would be fulfilled by Christ. If we say that Christ acted because the scriptures foretold it, it would follow that the New Testament existed for the sake of the Old Testament and for…
Matthew Levering wisely rejects von Balthasar’s notion that Ezra-Nehemiah is “like a brook in the process of drying up”: “Why should the rebuilding of the temple and the renewal of obedience to the Torah, despite the diminishment of the splendor of the temple and the continuing failure fully to observe…
In a review of George Steiner’s latest book in the May 2 TLS, David Martin speculates on the connection between biblical exegesis and the development of intellectual toughness. For Jews and Scots, he says, “there are the intellectual resources built up by strenuous exercises, in wresting sense from sometimes recalcitrant…
Music is often considered the most mystical, ephemeral, ethereal of all arts. For some, music is for this reason the most perfect, the most purely artistic, of all arts. Maybe. But think: When Bach wants to “comment” (Calvin Stapert’s term) on the chorale “Wachet auf” in Cantata 140, he gives…
The distribution of angelic appearances in Matthew is significant. Angels actually appear as characters in the story only in chapters 1-4 and 28. In total, there are seven uses of “angel” in passages that describe angels as characters (1:20, 24; 2:13, 19; 4:11; 28:2, 5; there is also Satan’s quotation…
When the fisherman in the dragnet parable (Matthew 13:47-50) pull the net to the beach, they “sat down” in order to gather the good fish and throw the bad away. Why sit? Comfort? I doubt it. Jesus is talking about the end of the age, when the Twelve, made fishers…
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