Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For Part 1, click HERE . How did Paul’s earliest commentators view his juxtaposition of music and drunkenness, and did they connect it to the ancient Greek ideas of musical ethos described in Part I? Origen, one of the earliest commentators on Paul, writes about Ephesians 5:18-19: One, however, who…
Perhaps it is because I am a musician that I have always found Ephesians 5:18-19 so arbitrary. But isn’t it a little odd to contrast music and drunkenness? Perhaps it is not obvious that that is what Paul is doing; I know, for myself, that it is remarkably easy to…
In 1 Corinthians 7:12-16 Paul deals with how the Corinthian Christians are supposed to be relating to unbelieving spouses. He essentially tells them, “Look, if your unbelieving spouse is willing to stay with you as a faithful Christian, don’t initiate a divorce. If he/she wants to leave you, let him/her…
For Part 1, click HERE . Those who focus on the supposed “pacifism” of Jesus and condemn the violence of God’s judgments throughout the Old Testament overlook the ministry of sacrificial bloodshed as an alternative to human bloodshed. The sword bearing of the sacrificial system was introduced to avoid the…
How should a Christian respond to the objection that the Bible, like the Koran, is a book of violence and bloodshed? Numerous answers have been offered by well-meaning exegetes, but none of them gets to the heart of the matter: God desires to place a sword in the hands of…
Beginning this summer, Dr. Alastair Roberts will join the Theopolis Institute as an adjunct Senior Fellow, the Institute has announced. Dr. Roberts will be a regular on the Theopolis podcast, teach intensive courses and in the Fellows Program, and help develop new programs and outlets. Roberts earned his PhD from…
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Lawrence Stone records the following in his classic Crisis of the Aristocracy : “So deep [was] feeling of a fundamental distinction of ranks that gentlemen did not hesitate to behave in ways which would today be considered base and even cowardly. When Lord Herbert of Cherbury was shipwrecked at Dover…
A hypothesis to explore: What is the connection between the postmodern “death of the author” and higher critical methods of biblical interpretation? Did the dissolution of the text in biblical studies contribute to a dissolution of the author in texts generally? To what extent is Wellhausen responsible for Barthes and…
At times, I’ve felt that my polemics against semi-marcionitism in sacramental theology and hermeneutics finds no actual targets. And then I read something like this. In his book on hermeneutics, Louis Berkhof characterizes the difference between type and antitype: “The one represents truth on a lower, the other, the same…
Butler cleverly suggests that postmodernism’s leftism ends up underwriting rightist politics: “a left-inspired distrust of authority . . . makes recognition of difference possible, and yet those who are perhaps most in favor of leaving differently defined groups in isolation, to compete and fight it out, are those on the…
Poor Christopher Butler: He really doesn’t like postmodernism, but he keeps saying that postmodernism at its most sane is just repeating what liberals have always believed and doing what liberals have always done. Postmodernists challenge “the boundaries of our social roles,” and liberals join in; in fact, “the postmodernist deconstructive…
Postmodernists claim that discourses are inevitably exercises of power. To theorize is to classify, and classification, well, puts things in classes, asserts authority over them. Butler offers this example: “You believe what the young surgeon tells you, and so you give him permission to anaesthetize you, cut you up, and…
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