Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Place names become fraught with meaning by association with people and events. The name “Wittenberg” calls to mind Luther and the Reformation for Protestants and Catholics alike. Geneva has a wider range of associations, but the Reformation Wall, with its four main statues of William Farel, John Calvin, Theodore Beza,…
“…a mystery without a solution, a horror story without savagery, a nightmare in which all the watches stop at noonday…” The Bestial Gardens of Men Then they will say to the mountains, “Fall on us!” and to the hills, “Cover us!” (Luke 23:30) The following lines by Edgar Allan Poe,…
2 Samuel 11-12, which record David’s sin with Bathsheba and its aftermath, is structured chiastically: This arrangement highlights several things about the episode. It reinforces what is obvious from even a casual reading, that the transition in the story occurs with Nathan’s confrontation of David’s sin and David’s confession. Up…
Medieval bestiaries are packed with quaintly inaccurate information about animals, birds, and other created things. Foxes and snakes are devilish critters; stags, pelicans and elephants are Christlike in their various ways. Of course, the medievals picked this up from the Bible, where bestiary observations are fairly common. “Go to the…
What do Reformational Catholicism and craft beer have in common? The question seems to beg for a punchline. Better yet, it would be pretty good clickbait for an article on Katharina von Bora’s “spirited” contribution that helped spark the Protestant Reformation. Well, this is no joke and I am certainly…
Suffering Defined Suffering happens. We witness it all around us and experience it in our lives. It often comes from forces beyond our control. Suffering is inscrutable; it strikes unexpectedly, on a bright summer day or a cold winter night. We lament and are bewildered by suffering. But we are…
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The numbering of the sealed in Revelation 7 alludes to the census events of the book of Numbers. There, Moses initially numbers men twenty years and older, mustering them as the troops that will conquer the land. (The second census, in Numbers 26, includes women and has a different focus.)…
The “personalist” understanding of the Trinity, articulated most influentially in the work of John Zizioulas, has fallen on hard times. Recent scholars have attacked Zizioulas’s idea that Cappadocian Trinitarianism represented an ontological revolution, hammering again and again the distinction between divine and human personhood. Michel Barnes’s conclusion is the most…
Protestant soteriology claims to deal with perennial patterns of behavior and belief: Striving for approval from God by our performance, self-righteousness, works-righteousness, pride in our achievements, etc. Let’s grant that these are perennial patterns of behavior, though they will likely take various forms in different cultural settings. That’s not just…
Theodore Jennings ( Transforming Atonement , 158) observes that “what is visible on the grand scale of imperial political history also lodges itself in the dynamics of quite small-scale communities, including those that may seem to be, and may think of themselves as, and may even in important respects actually…
Markus Barth ( Acquittal by Resurrection ) sharply raises the question of the justice of God’s verdict of justification. How can God pronounce the guilty innocent, the ungodly righteous? Barth raises the stakes by insisting that the justice should be evident to all: “If after the proclamation of a verdict,…
Over at the Theopolis Institute site , I offer some reflections on the liturgical formation of culture through a consideration of the biblical anatomy of human action.
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