Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…
Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…
The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…
In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…
Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…
The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…
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I want to try to bridge the gap between medieval and Renaissance obsession with gift and gratitude and the Enlightenment where these are either privatized or reduced or ignored altogether. Let me begin with some additional thoughts on Timon of Athens, following the argument of an insightful 1947 article by…
Jenson’s article “What is the Point of Trinitarian Theology?” in Chrisoph Schwobel’s Trinitarian Theology Today offers one of the most succinct statements of Jenson’s theology. He begin with the observation that “theology” and particularly “Trinitarian theology” is not second-order discourse at base, but first-order discourse, reflected in addresses, prayers, and…
Veli-Matti Karkkainen offers a good summary of Jenson’s Trinitarian theology. He begins with seven propositions that describe Jenson’s particular contribution to Trinitarian studies. First, the Trinity is about the identity of Israel’s and the church’s God among the gods of the nations. Second, this God is identified by and with…
In a penetrating article on de doctrina Christiana , Rowan Williams points out that the grotesqueness and strangeness of the Bible is a “prophylactic against fastidiousness,” particularly the fastidiousness that assumes we have “nothing to learn from what startles or offends our taste.”
Jenson again: Western history teaches that “the experience of beauty does not survive the cessation of worship. Precisely those who thematically dedicate themselves to beauty, and who within the modern Western tradition regularly just so abandon worship, are in wave after wave driven at last to deny beauty as well.…
Robert Jenson says “It was the great single dogma of late Mediterranean antiquity’s religion and irreligion, that no story can be ‘really’ true of God, that deity equals ‘impassibility.’ It is not merely that the gospel tells a story about the object of worship; every religion of antiquity did that.…
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