Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The “second Reformation” introduced Reformed liturgy and teaching into Lutheran Germany. This was seen by some as a continuation of the Reformation and a purgation of Catholic remnants. The effort to carry on “further reformation” led to disputes with Lutherans. As Bodo Nischan has put it, the hottest debate in…
In J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century , Tom Shippey observes that Bilbo is a member of the middle class, a bourgeois. Bilbo does not have any servants, but his hole is “the home of a member of the Victorian upper-middle class of Tolkien’s nineteenth-century youth, full of…
Idolatry has deprived Israel of her senses. This was one of the early messages to Isaiah (Isaiah 6). Yahweh sent him out to a people who had been deprived of their senses because of their commitment to idols. They become like the idols they serve. They still have eyes, but…
In the current climate of Trinitarian discussion concerning personhood, it's good to reach back to David Bentley Hart's treatment of the subject in his wonderful Beauty of the Infinite . Hart addresses the dangers of misreading Rahner’s rule, namely, the danger of dissolving the ontological Trinity into the economic. In…
Chris Kou is the oldest son of Chinese immigrants. Chris and his brothers run a branding and marketing business, Imagineering, in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. In his spare time, he takes online courses from Reformed Theological Seminary, and aspires to be a pastor. Chris is also one of our…
The following was delivered as the Solemn Charge and Exhortation to Theopolis students beginning the Easter term course on Architecture and Liturgical Space . As we will be reminded repeatedly throughout the week, the Bible has a lot to say about building and buildings. Long stretches of Exodus, Kings, Chronicles,…
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John Walton argues in The Lost World of Genesis 1 (114) that the Bible attributes to God things that we explain in “natural” terms. He concludes that attempting to divide causation between “divine” and “natural” causation is “essentially unbiblical.” But then he proposes what amounts to a slight variation of…
Yahweh warns that He is going to measure out the wages for those who defy him (Isaiah 65:6-7): A. I will repay to their bosom B. their iniquities and the iniquities of their fathers C. because they have turned-to-smoke D. on mountains D’. And on high places C’. have scorned…
The first table setting in the Bible is the table of showbread in the tabernacle, set with twelve loaves of bread (Exodus 40:4, 22-23). That tabernacle table sets the stage for subsequent table settings. When Israel questions whether Yahweh can set a table in the wilderness (Psalm 78:19), they are…
Hughes Oliphant Old is the dean of Reformed liturgical scholars, and he has crowned his career with the publication of a massive (900+ pages) study of Holy Communion in the Piety of the Reformed Churches . The title is significant: Old is interested in Eucharistic piety and practice as much…
Peter Sloterdijk opens his Art of Philosophy (9-10) with a summary of the “epistemic suspended animation” that philosophy has traditionally demanded from its practitioners: “My aim is to show why the idea that the thinking person has to be a kind of dead person on holiday is inseparable from the…
Evangelia Anagostou-Laoutides’s Eros and Ritual in Ancient Literature is a complex, footnote-stuffed delight. She examines three myths with erotic overtones - Atalanta, Daphnis, and Orpheus - summarizing the different presentations of the myths in early Greek (Hesiod, Greek drama), Hellenistic (Theocritus, Callimachus), and Roman (Virgil, Ovid, Propertius) literature. Along the…
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