Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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In his history of Christianity, August Neander distinguished between gnostics who arose from within Judaism and those whose inspiration came from “Oriental” modes of thought. Here is his description of the Jewish sources of gnosticism: In the following respect, all these Gnostics agree ; they all held . . .…
A few scattered notes from Jarl Fossum’s book examining the links between the figure of the “angel of Yahweh” in Samaritan theology and the “demiurge” of gnosticism. 1) Fossum points out that Simon Magus, legendarily the fountain of Gnosticism, venerated the Torah, and that some of the church Fathers said…
In a 2006 book on the origins of gnosticism, Carl B. Smith offers an alternative account of the connections of Judaism and gnosticism. According to the JETS reviewer: Smith “proposes that gnosticism arose in a social context of ‘alienated Judaism’ influenced by Greco-Roman and early Christian ideas in the aftermath…
In a book published in 1959, R. M. Grant attempted “to explain Gnosticism as arising out of the debris of apocalyptic-eschatological hopes which resulted from the fall or falls of Jerusalem.” According to a reviewer in Theology T0day , “Grant stresses the Jewish element which, as he rightly says, has…
Origen says that the Ophite demiurge had the face of a lion and was connected with Saturn, and this has led some scholars to conclude that Jaldabaoth was a combination of Baal and Kronos. John of Damascus says that the Phoenicians held Kronos to be a kind of demiurge, and…
According to Alfred Honig (writing in the late 19th century), the Ophite name for the demiurge, Jaldabaoth, comes from a Hebrew phrase meaning “child of chaos,” and the etymology goes back at least to the 1820s. Scholem argued, however, that the name was invented by a Jew and is a…
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