Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Understanding Shakespeare’s Biblical references is vital for the interpretation of many, if not all, of Shakespeare’s plays. For Othello , it is especially important, not only because the interpretation of the play is contested among various approaches — feminist, homosexual, post-colonial, Marxist, Freudian, new historical, and others — but also…
Mike Allen of Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, scores some points in his review of The End of Protestantism . He lodges the fair complaint that my rhetoric sometimes outruns my evidence. He argues that more stress on the present reality of the church’s unity deepens the tragedy of division; divisions…
I begin with two observations. First, on any millennial view, the Christian account of history is progressive, moving from the garden to the city. It is eschatological not only in that there is an end, but that the end is a glorified beginning, not merely a return to origins. To…
The church is a new form of polity that erupts into the world as much as the Son of God comes into the world. It’s a real-world political alternative to the polities of the ancient world. It resolves many of the political dilemmas of the ancient world, though not simply…
In my last post , I explained how Baptists really have a “one-ordinance-one sacrament” ecclesiology. I said this: “what Baptists really believe, in modern parlance, is that there is one ordinance (baptism which is a sign or symbol only) and one sacrament (the Lord’s Supper in which feeding upon Jesus…
One of the most extensive and penetrating responses to the Yoder-Hauerwas attack on Constantiniansm is found in Oliver O’Donovan’s Desire of Nations , in a chapter entitled “The Obedience of Rulers.” O’Donovan defines the word “Christendom” as “a historical idea,” specifically “the idea of a professedly Christian secular political order,…
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1 Chronicles 23:24-27 is arranged chiastically: A. Levites numbered from 20 years and up. B. David said. C. Yahweh rests and dwells. C'. Levites no longer carry tent and implements. B'. Words of David. A'. Levites numbered from 20 years and up. C' is disputable, but the structure nearly forces…
O ne paragraph illustrates both the reasons I admire Christian Wiman's 2013 searingly honest My Bright Abyss , and the reasons I find the book frustrating to the point of irritation. A poet and erstwhile editor of Poetry , Wiman came to Christianity as an adult in the midst of…
T he authors of Ritual and its Consequences (104–6) note a contrast between civilizations that are bound by authoritative rituals and those that are not. The latter are deeply concerned with sincerity: “ Civilizations or movements with a diminished concern for ritual have an overwhelming concern with sincerity, which we…
“P riestcraft” was one of the charges regularly lodged by skeptics against clergy and theologians in early modern Europe. It connoted obscurantism, deception, manipulation of popular opinion. It connoted everything wrong with established Christianity, especially in its more catholic manifestations. Not all the charges of “priestcraft” were directed at clergy.…
O ne of the virtues of Anthony J. Carroll's Protestant Modernity is his effort to put flesh on the bony term “secularization,” often batted about in an airily sociological fashion. On-the-ground secularization is easiest to spot in Revolutionary France, when institutions and personnel and property and records were removed from…
K eith G. Meador devotes his contribution to The Secular Revolution to an analysis of the therapeutic takeover of American Protestantism. He focuses on the role of the Christian Century under the editorship of Charles Clayton Morrison, who used the magazine to advance a “scientific” and simplified Christianity supposedly fit…
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