Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Ten-thousand ‘yeses’ and a single ‘no.’ From bough it dangles, beauty to the eyes, For belly, food, a fruit to make one wise. Too soon, they eat; they know; the leaves they sew, But, oh! the Love who asks, “Where did you go?” Confessions flow from under leaf’s disguise; A…
In his masterful work, De Doctrina Christiana , Augustine of Hippo writes: I would have learned men to know that the authors of our Scriptures use all those forms of expression which grammarians call by the Greek name tropes, and use them more freely and in greater variety than people…
“In accordance with the creation pattern, God sovereignly took hold of Adam and put him to sleep. Then God divided Adam by removing flesh and bone from his side, and restructured humanity into male and female. When Adam awoke, God distributed the woman to him. Adam gazed upon her and…
Greta Gerwig’s new film, Barbie, has been criticized, probably rightly, for having too many ideas and layers to properly bring in any for a landing. Gerwig herself thought the script was so “ wild and anarchic ” that she was surprised WB agreed to make it. Many see it as…
“Now John wore a garment of camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey” (Matt. 3:4). Why is John the Baptizer clothed with camel’s hair? Why does he want to look like a camel? Or at least: what does he expect…
In the second greatest story ever told, The Brothers Karamazov , Fyodor Dostoyevsky tells the story of a family plagued by the lasting legacy of sin’s destructive power and the all-surpassing truth that God is Light and in Him is no darkness. The young protagonist, Alyosha, is a monk committed…
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O’Donovan makes the point, against Markus, that Augustine does not describe the earthly city as a combination of private ends and public or common utility. This would be a secular system, which leaves ends to individual citizens as they make use of common goods. O’Donovan says Augustine does something like…
Von Balthasar again: Creation is God’s free decision. There need not be a world. “But if he decides to create a world, then of course this decision can only take the form of the analogy of being, which is grounded in God’s very ‘essence’ itself. Created being must be by…
Von Balthasar says that grace presupposes a nature that is free from revelation: “If there is to be revelation, then it can only proceed from God to a creature - to a creature that precisely as a creature does not include revelation in its conceptual range.” Van Til is much…
Von Balthasar puts the nature/grace distinction in simple terms, and ones that resonate with certain strains of Reformed theology: “It belongs to the very essence of the creature that it must indeed be creature, but not a creature who has been exalted to a new order of grace: by nature…
Rahner says that God’s self-gift “can and must” be an “ever astounding wonder, the unexpected, the unexacted gift.” In an extended footnote, he explains that this “can and must” means both that God’s self-communication is in fact unexacted, and that it must be of necessity . On the latter point:…
Rahner re-describes the nature/grace problem in terms of God’s self-communicating love, which is the final cause of creation and the first intention of God: “Everything else exists so that this one thing might be: the eternal miracle of infinite Love.” (Good Edwardsian supralapsarian, he.) But for Rahner, as for every…
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