Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Every attempt to understand the Christian sacraments makes use of comparisons or analogies with other rituals, events, or customs. Calvin and those who followed him, for example, spoke of the sacraments as “seals,” and compared them to the “seal of approval” that an official impresses on a document. Thinking about…
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy has pointed out in his essay "Hitler and Israel, or On Prayer" (available for $2.00 from Biblical Horizons ) that it is God’s word "No!" that establishes in a culture the distinction between the Creator and the creature. The Bible repeatedly says "No!" to every human attempt to…
If you missed Gattaca at the movie theaters, you can probably check it out from your local video store now. And you should. This is one of those relatively rare thought-provoking movies that can stand being watched with brain in gear more than once. It is also poetic, sensitive, visually…
Part 4: The Nephilim Factor Western Civilization partakes of what I call "the Nephilim Factor." The Enoch Factor means that the pagans get there first. This is both a blessing and a danger. As a blessing, it means that they work out techniques of dominion over the lower creation that…
The Worship Service Then the one speaking with me took me by the hair and lifted me into the air in the middle of the great room. And as I watched, I saw people entering the room to the sound of the great bells outside. Then entered from all four…
Part 3: Philosophy (continued) If we realize that human beings are the images of God, and that man hates God, then we realize that all non-Christian political philosophy is founded on a fundamental hatred of other human beings, a hatred manifest in contempt. Rome, like Enoch, was founded on the…
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Mark 10:29-30: Jesus said, Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or farms, for My sake and for the gospel’s sake, but that He shall receive a hundred times as much now in the…
We think we possess things by holding on to them. We own our house and our car and our cat and our certificates of deposit when we have free and unhindered use of them. If there’s a new lock on the door when you come home from work, you don’t…
Another hurrah to Rahner. He notes that part of the standard view of grace among post-Reformation Catholics is the notion that grace is “above man’s conscious spiritual and moral life.” It is an object of faith, but it never penetrates to consciousness or experience: “only nature and its acts constitute…
Enough beating up on Rahner for the moment. He has this statement in Nature and Grace : “there has been no ‘chemically pure’ description of pure nature, but mixed in with it there are traces of elements of historical nature, i.e., nature possessing grace. Who is to say that the…
Rahner (still working in his little book, Nature and Grace ) distinguishes between “being ordered to grace” and “being directed to grace in such a way that without the actual gift of this grace it would all be meaningless.” He affirms the first, not the second. A created spirit “is…
Rahner says that the Beatific vision is “through grace” and comes as a “free gift, not due to [man] by nature, not pledged to him by his creation (so that our creation, which was a free act of God, not due to us, and the free gift of grace to…
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