Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Every attempt to understand the Christian sacraments makes use of comparisons or analogies with other rituals, events, or customs. Calvin and those who followed him, for example, spoke of the sacraments as “seals,” and compared them to the “seal of approval” that an official impresses on a document. Thinking about…
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy has pointed out in his essay "Hitler and Israel, or On Prayer" (available for $2.00 from Biblical Horizons ) that it is God’s word "No!" that establishes in a culture the distinction between the Creator and the creature. The Bible repeatedly says "No!" to every human attempt to…
If you missed Gattaca at the movie theaters, you can probably check it out from your local video store now. And you should. This is one of those relatively rare thought-provoking movies that can stand being watched with brain in gear more than once. It is also poetic, sensitive, visually…
Part 4: The Nephilim Factor Western Civilization partakes of what I call "the Nephilim Factor." The Enoch Factor means that the pagans get there first. This is both a blessing and a danger. As a blessing, it means that they work out techniques of dominion over the lower creation that…
The Worship Service Then the one speaking with me took me by the hair and lifted me into the air in the middle of the great room. And as I watched, I saw people entering the room to the sound of the great bells outside. Then entered from all four…
Part 3: Philosophy (continued) If we realize that human beings are the images of God, and that man hates God, then we realize that all non-Christian political philosophy is founded on a fundamental hatred of other human beings, a hatred manifest in contempt. Rome, like Enoch, was founded on the…
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With income inequality and social mobility in the air, two articles in the Economist challenge the conventional wisdom. One is a report on a study conducted by economists at Harvard and Berkeley that concludes, in the Economist ’s words, “Despite huge increases in inequality, America may be no less mobile…
Andrew Solomon begins his NYTBR review of Jennifer Senior’s All Joy and No Fun with the arresting claim that “parenting as we know it—predicated on the unconditional exaltation of our children—is no more than 70 years old.” The key shift in the past century has been, Senior says, our children’s…
When Jeroboam I split the northern tribes from the house of David, he secured the unity of his area by establishing shrines for golden calf worship at the northern and southern borders of his territory—at Dan and Bethel respectively. Both were obvious choices. Bethel had been a holy place since…
Memoria passionis is a central feature of Johann Baptist Metz’s “postidealist theology,” a theology that is founded in practice and knows its own historical embeddedness. For Metz, this doesn’t just involve memory of Christ. For moderns, it’s equally the memory of Auschwitz. In A Passion For God , he recalls…
Metz ( A Passion for God , 49-53) suggests that the “sickness unto death of religion is not naivete, but banality.” Banality arises from some of the deep seeds of modernity. Our “cult of possibility,” our confidence that “everything is possible” has an underside, resignation to the fact that everything…
Noah is named as the rest-bringer for the human race. And he does just that, not simply by enduring the flood but by offering righteous worship on the holy mountain after the flood. Yahweh initially repents that He made “the man”; in the end, He has a change of heart…
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