Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Imagine driving up to Canada and stopping at a restaurant to get a bite to eat. While you’re sitting at the table, an enthusiastic young man comes over to you and says in an excited voice, "Are you an American?" You reply, "Yes, I am." "Wonderful! I have so little…
1 O Lord Almighty, God of our fathers, of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and of their righteous posterity; 2 You who have made heaven and earth with all their order; 3 who have shackled the sea by Your word ofcommand, who have confined the deep and sealed it with…
Part 1: 1When King Astyages was laid with his fathers, Cyrus the Persian received his kingdom. 2 And Daniel was a companion of the king, and was the most honored of his friends. 3Now the Babylonians had an idol called Bel, and every day they spent on it twelve bushels…
This debate has been going on for some time. But with few exceptions, almost all explanations of Presbyterian church polity claim that a “church” (meaning a single local congregation) must be ruled by “a plurality of elders” of whom one may happen to teach and work full-time doing so. This…
I hope that those who are advocating reading more of the ancient, "classical" literature of the ancient, "classical" world, are also promoting the Apocrypha. I’m afraid that many Christians don’t realize what great literature much of the Apocrypha is. It is not, of course, inspired by God, and perhaps because…
PRESBYTERIANISM is a term referring to a system of government in the Church. It is commonly contrasted with Congregationalism and Episcopalianism. Presbyter is a Greek word that is translated as “elder” in our English New Testaments. Thus, Presbyterianism is commonly defined as “rule by elders.” This is a misleading definition.…
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According to Michael Nerlich ( Ideology of Adventure ), “all figures of the Greek and Latin novels of adventure are ‘involuntary’ adventurers.” Mikhail Bakhtin too ( Dialogic Imagination ) emphasizes that in earlier adventures “an individual can be nothing other than completely passive, completely unchanging” and function as “merely the…
Winder McConnell ( Nibelungenleid , 98-99) sketches the changing uses of the epic in the mid-20 th century: “During the Weimar Republic, the themes and motifs of the Nibelungenlied had been employed by authors of antirepublican persuasion to express optimism for Germany’s future, but poets and dramatists sympathetic to the…
In an essay in A Companion to Gottfried of Strassburg's Tristan , Ulrich Muller argues that “In Tristan und Isolde Wagner radically transformed the meaning and message of Gottfried’s romance, just as he had in Parsifal. As cast by Gottfried (and in all medieval versions), the lovers and their love…
Andreas Capellanus literally wrote the book on the Art of Courtly Love , but the concluding Book 3 suggests that the book was a cautionary tale throughout. Capellanus closes the treatise with an exhortation to Walter, the man to whom the book is addressed to abstain from the desires of…
Even today, when historians have abandoned the idea, many regard the Middle Ages as a time dark and ignorant, the huddled masses in shadows until the burst of light that came with the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment. For centuries, it is often thought, medieval thinkers knew little of the…
Allegorization was one of the techniques medieval used, adapted from ancient writers, to incorporate pagan writing in a biblical framework. As Ernst Curtius ( European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages ) writes, “the Middle Ages subjected profane writers to allegorical interpretation exactly as it did the Bible, and .…
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