Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If 1 Chronicles were a movie, it would begin with two hours and forty-five minutes of credits: Name after name scrolling across the screen, most of them (as far as we’re concerned) obscurities and nonentities and unknowns, forgotten fathers and sons and mighty men; all the bit players in the…
Let me locate myself. I’m sitting on a sand dune, three hundred feet above the blue-as-a-swimmer-crab water of Lake Michigan. I’m so high above the surface that the sound of the waves flopping onto the beach is as quiet as wind easing through a screen door. Around me are several…
My title is too grand. What I offer here falls far short of a full description of poetry. I barely offer a definition. A more accurate title would be “Axioms and Suspicions About Poetry.” Axioms first. I have three of them. The first is the closest I can come to…
In his book In Defense of Food Michael Pollan does just what the title suggests, he defends food. Pollan argues that the presupposition behind modern food science, or “nutritionism” as he calls it, is that humans don’t need food, they need nutrients. To be sure, modern science is not yet…
The early church took possession of the Roman Empire within a few centuries, largely because she ministered sacrificially in word and deed. The church provided services and care that the empire and pagan religions could not in times of crisis. The faithful witness of those serving Christians bore great fruit…
My title, “The Original Murder” will be understood by many readers, if not almost all, to refer to Cain’s murder of Abel, but I have in mind the very first murder, the one which Jesus pointed to when He said that Satan was a murderer “from the beginning.” “You are…
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The Reformed Orthodox were entirely correct to discern a fundamental threat and challenge in the spread of Cartesianism, especially as regards the relation of philosophy and theology. But it’s hard to read about their responses without sadness. “Whatever reason brings out of its stinking heaps must be subordinate to the…
On the one hand: Method is a discipleship - a “following after.” And the Cartesian methodus is in conflict with the “following after” demanded of a Christian disciple. Here, Descartes offers a different way, a different truth and life. The Christian “method” of knowledge and wisdom is discipleship, not doubt…
Bizer again, on Melchior Leydekker’s summary of the Cartesian critique of Reformed orthodoxy: “The Cartesians reproach the orthodox to the effect that their theology is not scriptural, that they have re-introduced Catholic scholasticism into the Church; that they hinder every advance in knowledge and their work does not have scientific…
At several points, Bizer notes that the Reformed orthodox critics of Cartesian philosophy and its application to theology formulated their arguments to buttress their opposition to Lutheran ideas of the real presence. Peter van Mastricht “resists the proposition that God could do something contradictory; one of the reasons for this…
Reformed Orthodoxy failed to stop the spread of Cartesian philosophy, despite vigorous efforts. Why? Bizer suggests that the orthodox critique often adopted much of what it criticized. In Martin Schoock’s notorious response to Descartes, “there is no word . . . about the fact that the Cartesian proof of God…
Johannes Cocceius, a father of biblical theology, would seem to have little in common with Cartesian rationalism. But most of the Cocceians in the latter part of the 17th century were Cartesians. Ernest Bizer (in an article entitled “Reformed Orthodoxy and Cartesianism”) suggests that there was an affinity between the…
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