Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Inspired by our recent podcast on Christmas and Advent music recommendations, we offer here a list of excellent recordings that are sure to enrich your Advent and Christmas season. Praetorius: Mass for Christmas Morning Paul McCreesh with the Gabrieli Consort and Players Amazon | Spotify | Apple Music 2. Christmas…
In the year 1483 in the city of Nuremberg, the leaders of the renowned Saint Lawrence Church were seeking to redesign their altar, and above the table where the priests presided over the eucharist, they wanted new art installed above the prestigious Krell altar. What they decided on took everyone…
The consequences of disobedience start with exile from the garden of God and the Tree of Yahweh, but they do not end there. They cascade down through the structure of the dynastic order. Everything which had previously been given in the Kingdom of Elohim is either taken back or curtailed…
Parallelism: A Course Correction If you have ever studied Hebrew poetry, you have probably heard its basic poetic feature described as “parallelism.” Hebrew poetry is not metered, it does not rhyme, it does not employ many of the common poetical tropes, but its distinctive (and almost universal) feature is commonly…
In The Crown and the Courts , David C. Flatto traces the development of the idea of judicial independence in Jewish commentaries on the Scriptures – particularly Deuteronomy 17 – from the Second Temple and early rabbinic periods. These periods roughly span 400 BC to 300 AD. Flatto does not…
A curious feature of the Infancy Narratives in the Gospel of Luke is the naming of John the Baptist. When the angel appears to Zechariah, he is instructed to give his promised son the name John (Luke 1:13). On the day of John’s circumcision, Luke tells us that “they [presumably…
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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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