Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Flying scrolls. Red horses. Beasts coming out of the sea. Winged women. The list goes on. Apocalyptic literature in the Bible is like a cross between science fiction and Marvel comics. And the Bible has a fair bit of this sort of thing. Daniel sees visions in Babylon, Zechariah sees…
Trinity House Institute has taken a new name, the Theopolis Institute. This striking new name expresses our unique vision and mission and captures the unified purpose behind all our specific programs and activities. We still have Bible, liturgy, and culture in our tagline. We still offer the same courses on…
Adam Kotsko offers a socio-political variation on the Christus Victor atonement theory in his 2010 study, The Politics of Redemption: The Social Logic of Salvation . He does this by explaining "the devil" in terms of the Hegelian concept of "objective spirit," Geist . As Kotsko puts it, Geist "refers…
Two factors keep Nahtali Meshel from discussing the meaning of sacrifice until late in his The "Grammar" of Sacrifice . The first has to do with the texts he draws from: "P says little about the meaning of its rituals" (174). The other has to do with the grammatical theory…
Chapter 5 of Naphtali Meshel's The "Grammar" of Sacrifice focuses on "praxemics," the physical actions of sacrificial ritual. Praxemes are constituted by six elements: an "atomact," an elementary physical act or gesture; an actor; an object that is acted up; a target for the action and often for the object…
Two chapters of Naphtali Meshel’s The “Grammar” of Sacrifice cover what he calls “jugation” and “hierarchies.” The first involves the addition of other materials to an animal offering. Jugates include wine, cereal, and oil that are added to the animals (zoemes) that are offered in sacrifice. Some jugates are coordinated…
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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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