Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The story of Judges 19 and the subsequent chapters are some of the most shocking and appalling accounts in all of Scripture. The callousness of the old host and the Levite, and the monstrous brutality of the men of Gibeah, leaves us feebly scrabbling for words by which to surmount…
David has become king. He has conquered the capital city of Jerusalem. He has brought the ark of Yahweh into the city and placed it in a tent. He has stationed Levites at the tent to offer sacrifices of praise. An anomaly hits him: He has a cedar-paneled palace, and…
In Part 2 of this series we traced what we have of the development of the epiclesis in the liturgy of the Church. In this third and final part we’ll look at the theological implications of this and how we may apply what we’ve learned. As we saw in Part…
In a 2014 piece published in First Things , I offered a "wish list" for Protestant churches, a checklist for a future catholic Protestantism. The wish list doesn't cover everything. It doesn't mention those things that Protestants, especially Evangelicals, already do, often exceedingly well, things like missions and evangelism and…
In the first part of this series we examined the meaning of “blessing” in Scripture and its parallels in Jewish liturgical tradition, but did not find anything that we could properly call an epiclesis (an invocation of the Holy Spirit). We did find examples of invocation of Jesus to “come”…
When the Aaronic priests were ordained, the blood of the ram of "filling” was placed on the lobe of the right ear, the right thumb, and the right big toe (Lev. 8:22-24). Similarly, the cleansing rite for a leper included smearing the right ear lobe, thumb, and big toe with…
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In his recent commentary on Daniel, Jim Jordan suggests that the modern notion that Josiah and his priests wrote “the book of the law” they claimed to discover in the temple was likely shared by people of Josiah’s time: “The image-users of the high places had always resented the official,…
Harold Bloom (in The Visionary Company ) writes that just as “French culture has been divided between those who have accepted the French Revolution and its consequences and those who have sought to deny and resist them,” so English culture is “divided between those who have accepted the Puritan religious…
In her book on Joachim of Fiore, Marjorie Reeves notes that Joachim insists on diligent study of both testaments as the means for reaching the Spiritual interpretation: “The relationship is clearly a Trinitarian one: in Joachim’s phrase, the Spiritualis intellectus proceeds from both the Testaments, just as the Spirit proceeds…
In the first of his Dialogues , the fifth-century Christian writer Sulpicius Severus said that “there is no doubt that Antichrist, conceived by an evil spirit, has already been born.” He spelled out his expectations for the future: Nero and the Antichrist would come, Nero ruling in the west and…
According to Weber, personal charisma was the key distinguishing feature of prophetic office, and also the feature that most clearly separated prophets from priests: :”the prophet declares new revelations by charisma, whereas the priest serves to a sacred tradition. It is no accident that almost no prophet has come from…
Feminist theology overtly objects to masculine names for God, but Christopher Seitz says that the debate goes much deeper: “what is at stake in modern debates is not whether God is father or can be addressed as ‘he.’ Rather, what is at stake is whether we are entitled to call…
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