Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In a brief article entitled, “The Theology of Old Testament Sacrifice," Gordon Wenham, expanding on a comment about ritual from anthropologist Monica Wilson, states: We resort to ritual when we want to express our deepest feelings. Consider the rituals used in greeting people in our society: a nod, a handshake,…
Everyone here in Cambridge is talking about sacrifice. My supervisor, Dr. John Milbank, is working on a book on gift in which he is dealing with recent literature on sacrifice. The graduate seminar in Systematics during Michaelmas Term focused on the theme of sacrifice. The first presenter was Dr. Ian…
Protestant-Catholic debates about the sacraments have usually taken the form of debates about sacramental efficacy. Protestants claim that Catholics believe that sacraments work ex opere operato , virtually a magical view of the sacraments. A priest goes through the motions and says the hocus-pocus and "presto!" the sacraments confer grace.…
When Israel came out of Egypt, she was a collection of tribes descended from the Tribe of Abraham. Tribalism drops out of history into the "world" by looking back to ancestors and by orienting to the spirits that govern the world. The world must not be manipulated, because to do…
Angels are the mediators of the Old Creation, as Eugenio Corsini has rightly pointed out in his commentary, The Apocalypse. For this reason, argues Corsini, the book of Revelation must have to do with the final end of the Old Creation order, which he associates with the work of Jesus…
Our procedure in "Through New Eyes Volume 2" thus far has been to lay out the general overview of history and its meaning as the Bible presents it. My hope is to fill this out in four major sections, corresponding to the four ages and the four testaments in the…
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Book 6 of Bonaventure’s The Soul’s Journey into God, is about the Trinity. The premise is that good is essentially “self-diffusive,” and thus the highest good must be “most self-diffusive.” This highest self-diffusion is not possible unless it is “actual and intrinsic, substantial and hypostatic, natural and voluntary, free and…
According to Richard of St. Victory ( On the Trinity ), God is the fullness and perfection of all goodness. Plotinus said as much. But then Richard adds that nothing is better than charity, something that Plotinus does not say. For Richard, charity cannot be a solitary enterprise; charity must…
David Chilton points out ( Days of Vengeance , 196-7) points out that seven features of the creation are rendered useless when the sixth seal is opened (Revelation 6:12-14): 1. Earth quakes. 2. The sun turns black. 3. The moon turns to blood. 4. Stars fall from heaven. 5. Heaven…
In the course of her lively challenge to goddess-obsessions among scholars ( In the Wake of the Goddess ), Tikva Frymer-Kensky claims that ancient Israel embodied a proto-feminist sexual polity: “There i nothing disinctively ‘female’ about the way women are portrayed in the Bible, nothing particularly feminine about either their…
When the Lamb opens the sixth seal, the earth and sky collapse (Revelation 6:12-17). The earth shakes, the sky grows dark, the world begins to fall apart. Like Egypt in the time of Moses, the Lamb strikes the earth with plagues and, like the Egyptians, the people of the land…
Michael Solana thinks science fiction is doing us a disservice. Nighmarish predictions of the future aren’t new, but Solana thinks that they’ve become pervasive. A sub-sub-genre has taken over the field, and occupied our imagination. Solana writes, “dystopia has appeared in science fiction from the genre’s inception, but the past…
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