Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
That there is something wrong with the world is obvious. It does not take much time or brilliance to notice it. Once we get the feeling that we could imagine a better world, we are tempted to fix it or, if we cannot, to escape it. For both the world-fixers…
“Our Father in heaven,” what is man that we should be called your sons and daughters, beloved children of God Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, Yahweh of Hosts, the Ancient of Days. You are not a father preoccupied with work or engrossed in your smartphone; you are a present…
The Son of God took on human flesh and entered into the sin and suffering of our world. His life and teaching and suffering from His conception to His suffering on the cross teaches us a lot about how the good news enters into the world. Recently, I was teaching…
There is an unspoken rule about typology that permeates Evangelical thinking. It goes something like this: “If the New Testament authors don’t use an Old Testament character as a type, we don’t either.” There is a soundness in this reasoning, at least in a preliminary sense. There is no better…
In The world of Silence, Max Picard writes, “There does not seem to be any space left where there could possibly have been anything but noise. We take it for granted much as we take the air itself for granted. Everything begins and ends with noise.” Is it fair to…
God is Not There God is not in the book of Esther. Do a word search and you will get 0 results. Also try Lord, Yahweh, Prayer, Temple, or Sacrifice. Even names with God’s name in them, like Elijah, Jeremiah, or Daniel are missing. The fool says in his heart,…
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The medieval arguments in favor of the notion of preparation for justification through created grace are founded on anthropological and cosmological claims. McGrath summarizes the Summa Fratris Alexandri , which he calls “the first systematic discussion of the nature of created grace,” as follows: “The Holy Spirit can be said…
Here is a hypothesis or suspicion, not a conclusion, much less a conviction: The notion that God rewards what we do with what we have, and the notion that we are purely passive in salvation are not, as they appear, extreme opposites, but are two positions within the same framework.…
Charles Hodge doesn’t quite get to justification as deliverdict here, but he comes close: “[Paul] had just said that the believer cannot continue to serve sin. He here [in 6:7] gives the reason: for he who has died (with Christ) is justified, and therefore free from sin, free from its…
Strict justice, Aquinas argued, is only possible between equals, and since God and man are not equals there is never strict justice in God’s dealings with us. Further, God being God, He is never put in debt to His creatures, never obligated to give anything, unless by His own prior…
According to Calvin, only in a qualified sense. McGrath says, “The later Franciscan school, the via moderna and the schola Augustiniana moderna regarded the ratio meriti as lying in the divine good pleasure; nothing was meritorious unless God chose to accept it as such. This teaching was extended to include…
I have been greatly helped here by Cynthia Nielsen’s online summaries of Marion’s book. 1) One of Marion’s main ambitions is to move beyond the Western concern with being with its concomitant focus on the “object.” In place of “objectness,” a static notion of the things of the world, Marion…
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