Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For many people Christmas comes on December 25 and is over December 26. The tree is taken down along with the lights and the other decorations, and everyone begins setting the house in order for the new year. No more Christmas hymns. No more celebrations (well, until New Year’s Eve).…
The Ascension and the Incarnation should not be disconnected in our Christmas thinking or celebrations. As N.T. Wright notes, the ascension is "a central and vital feature without which all sorts of other things start to go demonstrably wrong. . . . where the ascension has been ignored or misunderstood,…
“In the Word was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness.” Thus John describes the incarnation of the Son. He comes as the living and life-giving light of the world. That’s good news. In the beginning, God spoke and light shone…
Christmas is all about Jesus. The angels announce Jesus’ birth, shepherds and wise men come to see Jesus, Herod wants to kill Jesus. We occasionally think of the Father who sent the Son, but we keep returning to the Son made flesh in Bethlehem’s manger. Meanwhile, as always, the Spirit…
Christmas is about many things, but one of the chief things revealed in the gospel of Christmas is the humility of God. We don't often think of humility as an attribute of God. If God is glorious and exalted, we think, He must be haughty and proud and self-centered. We…
John famously begins his Gospel with a piece of theology: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Matthew starts with a genealogy. John celebrates Advent with a hymn, Matthew with a list. For John, Jesus is the Word of creation…
Showing page 120 of 309
Showing page 1 of 43
It is well known that Greeks rarely offered holocaust sacrifices - sacrifices in which the entire animal is offered to the gods by being consumed in the fire. the most common sacrifice was the thysia , which always culminated with a meal. Alongside the rare holocausts were the equally rare…
When I spot an essay entitled “The Secret Auden,” I get nervous. When it’s in the New York Review of Books , I get nervouser. Edward Mendelson’s recent piece on Auden does refer to Auden’s homosexuality, but the focus of the piece is elsewhere: Auden’s dirty little secret is that…
Is the olah , the “whole burnt offering,” a “pure gift, as Moshe Halbertal has it in On Sacrifice (14)? It seems so: The entire animal is burned, no meat remains for the worshiper, there is no evident benefit given in return for the total devotion of an animal to…
Blood atones. That’s rooted in the created fact that life is in the blood, but in the Bible this doesn’t mean that blood is a kind of magical moral detergent. How then can it atone? It atones because God has “given” it for atonement: “I have given [blood] to you…
Stephen A. Geller offers an intriguing reading of the day of atonement rituals. He points out that, for all the attention given to the scapegoat, one of the unique features of this day’s rites, it is not said that the scapegoat atones for sin. What puts the kafar into Yom…
Why, Stephen A. Geller asks, does “P” consider blood a necessary agent for achieving forgiveness and the re-creation that is atonement? He answers by noting the sequence of Leviticus 16-17, which moves from the bloody cleansing and reestablishment of the sanctuary to the command that butchering be done in the…
Showing page 665 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
