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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Brian Vickers taught and researched English literature at Zurich for several decades. He is an impressive literary scholar and historian who has written on Shakespeare, rhetoric, tragedy, edited Bacon and others, and produced a nice shelf full of deeply researched books. He also seems to have run out of things…
Postmillennialists like to point out that leaven doesn’t always represent evil or corruption, which is true enough. But it’s hard to avoid the fact that leaven often does represent evil. That might form some of the background to Jesus’ parable of the leaven. David Garland writes: “The parable is not…
“Sowing” is a common image in the prophets for Israel ’s return from exile. But Matthew 13:38 says that the field is not the land but the “world.” So, I think the sowing is the scattering of the seed of Israel at the time of the exile. Israel is scattered…
Typically, the parable of the tares and wheat has been understood as a description of church history. Jesus is the owner sowing the field, the devil sows tares into the church (like Judas), and for that reason the church remains a “mixed multitude” until the end of the age. The…
Athanasius again: As a musician brings out “a single tune as the result, so also the Wisdom of God, handling the Universe as a lyre . . . produces well and fittingly, as the result, the unity of the universe and of its order, himself remaining unmoved with the Father…
Classical theology is often charged with dealing in static timeless categories, and there is no doubt something to this in some writers. But, not all by any means. In his account of sin, Athanasius says that sin has momentum because of the nature of the soul. The soul is “mobile”…
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