J. Brandon Meeks is a writer, studio musician, and Christian scholar. He serves his local parish as Theologian-in-Residence. He received his PhD. from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He is also a fan of Alabama football, the blues, and cheese. He blogs regularly at www.highchurchpuritan.com.
For W.H. Auden, there are two general ways of thinking of time—either history inevitably repeats itself, locking events into an established cycle where “time turns round itself in an obedient circle,” or history is made up of ordered times, of a regiment of generations marching toward a goal, of a string of events that are…
“And it shall come to pass, that he that is left in Zion, and he that remaineth in Jerusalem, shall be called holy, even every one that is written among the living in Jerusalem: When the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and shall have purged the blood of…
“Christ maintains his humanity to all eternity… It is a clothing which He does not put off. It is His temple which He does not leave. It is the form which He does not lose.”[1] ~Karl Barth For the Gospel to truly be “good news” there needs to be more to the story than life…
“He that will die with Christ upon Good Friday, must hear his own bell toll all Lent…”[1] So begins a Lenten sermon by that most eloquent of Anglican divines, the Rev. Dr. John Donne. Hearing these lugubrious chimes bind us together with Christ’s passion, we are reminded that our living and dying are of a…
“Cry out and shout, thou inhabitant of Zion: for great is the Holy One of Israel in the midst of thee” ~Isaiah 12:6 Holy Scripture begins where we must begin—with the grounding truth that God is not like us. Moreover, He is not like anything at all. He is incomparable, incomprehensible; sui generis—utterly unique, in…
The Presence of Christ and the Problem of “History” Among the problems of most ‘quests for the historical Jesus’ is the illusion of distance. It is assumed that the “Jesus of History” stands quite apart from our time. Granting his existence, the most charitable inquisitor still maintains that the man Jesus is quite foreign to…
Sacramental theology begins on page one. God prefigures the great regeneration of all things in the initial generation of all things. The first explicit lesson that we are taught in the opening verses of the Scriptures is that God is the creator of everything. The first implicit lesson that we learn is that God created…
Johnson was raised as a Baptist. By which I mean he was born in Georgia to parents who held a strong conviction against baptizing any infant who had not at least been to Vacation Bible School. Like most Baptist boys, he was a good Christian until round about the time he got his driver’s license….
St. John, in rapturous prose, takes us to the heights of the transcendent mystery in three, short, stabbing syllables when he writes, “God is love” (1 Jn. 4:16). This is no mere philosophical speculation concerning metaphysics; no, these gilded words evidence the inestimable value of the knowledge of God rightly appreciated. The Apostle declares that…
As part of the release of The Foolishness of God, we are running a series of articles by J. Brandon Meeks. The Old Testament is dying. Or so says Brent Strawn.[1] I tend to agree with his diagnosis. In many of our parishes, it is already time for a toe-tag. Someone said to me recently, “I…
