Alastair Roberts
54 articles
Curiosity and the Divine Council
Christopher Kou’s article on the divine council is a penetrating engagement with the work of Michael Heiser. It is a piece I will doubtless recommend to others in the future, as a perceptive and illuminating treatment of a subject that has risen markedly in popularity over the past decade. Christopher’s…
Eight Lessons on the Psalms from the Book of Hebrews
No book is more quoted in Hebrews than the Psalter: there are quotations and allusions to psalms on virtually every page. And many of the quotations are not passing references but closely considered and repeatedly cited as the author of Hebrews develops his central arguments. Much of Hebrews is exposition…
Women at Home: Forming Social Worlds
It is impossible truly to understand contemporary evangelical Christian debates about the roles of men and women without seriously reckoning with how they have been occasioned by a radical transmogrification of our economic, social, political, and sexual worlds in modernity. Mass urbanization and suburbanization, industrialization and mass production, the reordering…
What I'm Reading
I have been reading, thinking, and writing about the Internet and its effects upon our identities, communities, polities, and discourses for nearly a copy of decades. In that time, I have encountered no book as perceptive on the subject as Antón Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature…
Pentecost and the Gift of a New Politics
Many readers of the New Testament will, at some point or other, be troubled by the question of why Jesus’ earthly ministry did not address the Roman occupation. Perhaps as a child in Sunday school you were taught that the Jews were expecting a military deliverer, and that the form…
On the Pursuit of Status
In a recent tweet , which he later expanded into a Substack post , Aaron Renn wrote about the importance of ‘picking the right ladders to climb’. One of our most critical life decisions, Renn argues, is that of choosing the right ‘status hierarchies’ to which we will commit ourselves;…
It's About Time
There are countless scholars who have helped me in my reading of various passages of Scripture. I have gleaned insights and keys from them that have unlocked texts that once perplexed me. However, no scholar has done so much to teach me how to read the Scripture more generally than…
Taking Christian Anti-Feminism More Seriously
In his opening essay in this conversation , Gerald Hiestand poses the question: ‘Has Christianity been good for women?’ Drawing upon works such as Tom Holland’s Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind , he argues that Christianity effected a sexual revolution, holding male sexual behaviour to account and according…
You Shall Call His Name Joshua
Names are weighty things, a fact repeatedly evidenced in the biblical narrative. There are several occasions when the names mothers or fathers chose for their children, and the reasons for which the names were chosen, are given extended attention in the text. Much of Genesis 29 and 30, for instance,…
The Death of the Queen and a Christian Understanding of Sovereignty
On Thursday, September 8 th 2022, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II died. She was our longest-reigning monarch; the magnitude of her presence in the United Kingdom’s life defies most superlatives. The first of her fifteen British prime ministers was Winston Churchill; she appointed her final one, Liz Truss—who was born…
Our Patient and Peaceable Work
Agricultural and horticultural imagery pervades the epistle of James. James begins by addressing a diasporic people (1:1)—one that has been scattered like grain throughout the world. He concludes with the prayer of Elijah that ended the drought, after which the ‘heavens gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit’ (5:18).…
Ecclesiologies and Bibliologies
As Brad East perceptively demonstrates in The Church’s Book —the text around which this conversation is based—divergences in doctrines of Scripture will be more readily explicable when considered in terms of the generative doctrinal pressures of contrasting ecclesiologies. The exploration of these doctrinal pressures East undertakes in this work is…
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