Alastair Roberts
54 articles
The Church's Book
In his two recent books, The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context and The Doctrine of Scripture , Brad East investigates questions of bibliology. While The Doctrine of Scripture presents a condensed and accessible exploration of the subject, The Church’s Book —with which this conversation is chiefly concerned—offers…
A Response to Douglas Farrow
The COVID crisis has, to a remarkable extent, exposed pre-existing fault lines within society and the church. While the sort of political theological questions we are discussing in this current conversation may once have appeared largely academic, now they are pressed upon us with great urgency. Many Christians who had…
Trinity in Creation
Throughout the creation account of Genesis, we find hints of a sort of divine multiplicity of some undefined and mysterious kind. There is, as Peter Leithart has observed in his opening essay , multiplicity seen in the presence of the Spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters.…
Reality Beyond Ourselves
In A Conversation Waiting to Begin , his characteristically insightful reflection on gay controversies in the Church of England, Oliver O’Donovan criticizes Rowan Williams’ treatment of homosexual desire. Williams, he notes, treats homosexual desire as if its object were immediately apparent, as if homosexual desire pointed unequivocally towards homosexual relations.…
Investigating Sexual Identity
In opening this conversation on the subject of sexual identity, it might be helpful to begin with a consideration of some of the terminology that currently frames much of our cultural and Christian discourse and to move from there towards a more careful account of the precise object of our…
Renewing Our Media Ecosystem
In the essay that opens this conversation , Jeffrey Bilbro wrestles with challenges of our digital ecosystem and its reconfiguration of human relationships and communities. With new media come new forms of association, action, discourse, identity, and relation to the word, and with these dysfunctions, many of these unforeseen. When…
Dignity of the Laity: Protestant Politics and Papal Pretensions
Pater Edmund Waldstein’s response to the new nationalism is a stimulating and provocative elaboration of his position—a position influenced by his integralist political analysis. Although I am quite unpersuaded by his larger thesis—given my Protestant convictions, this should be no surprise—I have several points of agreement with his position, not…
The Virtues of Dominion
The human calling is not a gender-neutral one. By the very nature of the way that God created man and woman, the weight of the fivefold human commission—to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and exercise dominion over all of its creatures—would, though collaborative, fall very differently upon…
Exegetical Rules
Writing about ‘hyperbaton’, the phenomenon of putting words in an odd order, Mark Forsyth observes: [A]djectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in…
The Christian Art of Dying Well
The future never comes as we expect it to. When moderns have imagined what life will be like fifty or one hundred years hence, they have often fancied utopian or dystopian societies, filled with strange new technologies. However, when the future actually arrives, it never feels as we expected it…
The Rhetoric of Race
I appreciated Vincent Bacote’s article and the conversation that it has started. Although it may be de rigueur to begin such a response with a demonstration of my anti-racist bona fides, I am concerned that conversations on these matters have often been too dominated by a concern to justify or…
Rethinking Israel: A Response from Alastair Roberts
In the epistle of Romans, the Apostle Paul declares that, through the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah, God bared his holy arm before the nations and wrought salvation in fulfilment of his promises. This gospel is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes, to the…
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