Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Paradosis Center at John Brown University in Siloam Spring, Arkansas, put on its first conference last week, it was a remarkable event. It was an ecumenical conference including Orthodox (John Behr, Edith Humphrey, others), Catholic (Rusty Reno, Michael Root, others), and Evangelical (Timothy George, David Lyle Jeffrey). Unusually for…
Naphtali Meshel observes in his new The "Grammar" of Sacrifice that scholars have been talking for decades about the "grammatical" character of ritual and sacrifice in general, but have never actually analyzed a specific ritual or sacrificial system grammatically. Some even talk about a "universal grammar" of sacrifice "even though…
Some Christians are rather breezy about the problem of evil. We shouldn't be. Do I need to remind you of the grisly beheadings that have taken place over the past few weeks? Do I need to remind you of the blood of innocents that’s been spilled in our own country?…
Have you ever been to a wedding where the heavens opened and a voice declared the couple “husband and wife”? Few of us have. Beautiful as they are, most marriages are quite mundane. Yet when Jesus talks about marriage, He describes it as something that God does: “What God has…
Jesus is the last and greatest of the Prophets. He is the Prophet that Moses predicted (Deuteronomy 18). That means He gives the final word, brings the blueprints for the final temple, speaks the final world into existence, and has complete and permanent access to the divine court, where He…
Paul stands against those who are “troubling” or “disturbing” the Galatians churches ( tarasso ; 1:7; also in 5:10). The reference seems to be two great troublers from the Old Testament. First, Achan is described as a “troubler” for the problems he causes in the aftermath of the battle at…
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Milbank makes a couple of interesting points regarding the import of an Augustinian view of evil. 1) Augustine’s view assumes the goodness of matter, in fact the goodness of all being. This, Milbank claims, seems to excuse evil - it’s some lack, a weakness or finitude, that makes for evil.…
In the view of many, the Holocaust belied the Augustinian description of evil as the privation of good. Something much more insidiously positive was at work in the death camps. Hannah Arendt, however, seems to confirm the Augustinian perspective in her treatment of the banality of evil. According to Milbank,…
Kant bristles at the demand that he claims to hear “on all sides”: ” Don’t argue !” Officers tell us to obey, tax-officials to pay, clergy to pray in a certain way. But Kant wants to argue. Or does he? Maybe not: “in some affairs which affect the interests of…
Kant’s appeal in “What Is Enlightenment?” is not primarily intellectual but ethical. Enlightenment, Kant says, “is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” Immaturity he defines as “the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another,” and this immaturity is “self-incurred” when the cause is “lack of resolution…
David Gelernter, Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion . New York: Doubleday, 2007. 229 pp. Hardback, $24.95. America, G. K. Chesterton said, is a nation with the soul of a church. David Gelernter, the polymathic computer scientist from Yale, suggests that this doesn’t quite go far enough. For many, both…
Wiker and Witt suggest that God created pandas as “comic relief” in a blessed fit of “divine whimsy.” The suggestion is troubling even for Christians who defend creation, because, being engineers, they have swallowed the reductive notion that creation must be functional. Wiker and Witt offer this rejoinder: “To spurn…
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