Creaturely Awe and the Wonder of Creation

“We must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it,” Wendell Berry exhorted us 50 years ago. “We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence.” Since writing this,…
Natural Desire, Moral Indexes, and Pleasure According to Paul

Our relationship to pleasure has been tormented since the serpent appeared in Eden, right after the repeated affirmation of the goodness of creation. How are we to look at trees that are good for food, a delight to the eyes, and desired to make one wise? Such trees lie in the midst of paradise, always…
Perceiving the Good: Creation, Nature, and Normativity

“God saw that it was good.” As reported by Saint Augustine, the Manichees latched onto the peculiarity of this refrain in the opening chapter of Genesis to criticize the received Christian doctrine of creation. Read in a certain light, it seems to suggest that either God didn’t know what he was going to make before…
Paul, Positive Psychology, and the Good Life

“The divorce of the natural and moral universes is perhaps the worst legacy of the Enlightenment, and the most urgent challenge facing modern humankind.” So said British theologian Colin Gunton 35 years ago. One might reasonably claim that little progress has been made over the last quarter century. Ideas like meaning, value, and purpose are…
The Author of an Autonomous Creation: Chance, Providence, and Divine Action

In the summer of 1955, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a letter to W. H. Auden telling of his surprise while working on The Lord of the Rings: “I met a lot of things along the way that astonished me.” This feeling, that the characters in a novel can come to carry such powerful voices…
Carving Creation at the Joints: Resourcing the Aristotelian Revival

Remarking on the natural human propensities toward both pride and ease, Francis Bacon observed “A man will become attached to one particular science and field of investigation either because he thinks he was its author and inventor or because he has worked hard on it and become habituated to it.” This strikes most of us…
Carolingian in My Mind: Divine Foreknowledge, Action, and Contingency in the Ninth Century

The rise of the Carolingian Empire (ca. 800–888 AD) witnessed an abundance of theological and philosophical inquiry and controversy, not least because the relative political stability made connections across geographical regions easier, along with a widespread effort by its authorities to promote educational and religious reforms and thus to develop greater uniformity in Christian thought…
Signs of the Kingdom: Craig Keener on Miracles in the New Testament and Today

God acts in the world. Christians believe that the world is not some mechanical device that God wound up at creation and has since left unattended. God upholds and sustains the world in being, and absent his sustaining activity the world would simply cease to exist. While these beliefs are vital to the Christian faith,…
Unleashing the Old Testament: Craig Bartholomew’s Quest for the God of Scripture

“As God’s authoritative word, Scripture is normative for all of life, including science.” So says Craig Bartholomew, a member of the 2019–2020 Henry Resident Fellowship community. In today’s climate, these are fighting words—resulting in more heat than light. When we hear this sentiment from Bartholomew, however, it means something quite different. First, and most basically,…
Analytic Theology & Human Origins

The ancient Greek philosopher Thales believed, at least according to Aristotle, that everything is water. More precisely, he believed that water was the material principle underlying all things—“that of which all things consist, from which they first come and into which on their destruction they are ultimately resolved.” His rationale for this belief isn’t as…
Speaking of God: A Paleontologist’s Pilgrimage through the Ages

Ralph Stearley placed his trust in Jesus Christ during the mid-1970s, in the midst of his college years at University of Missouri and his studies in biological anthropology. Stearley, Professor of Geology at Calvin College, is the first natural scientist to be awarded the Henry Resident Fellowship. Like many of Christians in the sciences, his…
What It Means to Be Human

A modern maxim has long since taken up residence in most theology departments across the world today: we no longer live in a time where the old, substantival metaphysics remain convincing. If historical-theological accounts of the nineteenth century have taught us anything, it was that each passing theologian sought to outdo the one who had…