Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…
Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…
The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…
The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…
This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…
If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…
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In his pungent recent book, Liquid Life (Polity, 2005), the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes the divergence between the “teaching” and the “taught” classes within the global economy. What he calls the “knowledge classes” are experts at seeking and achieving satisfaction, and have mastered the communications and transportation technologies that…
INTRODUCTION Mary’s role in redemption has been highlighted, and sometimes distorted far beyond biblical warrant. By comparison, Joseph is the neglected member of the “holy family.” Yet, Matthew focuses more attention on Joseph than on Mary, and Joseph is presented as an antitype of the Joseph of Genesis and a…
John J. O’Keefe and R. R. Reno, Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 156 p. In recent years, theologians have given intensive, and increasingly favorable, attention to patristic and medieval interpretation of the Bible. O’Keefe and Reno, both…
Matthew 1:1: The Book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. As we saw in the sermon this morning, when the Son of God took on human flesh, he took on the human condition in its totality. He took on ancestors and a…
“What time is it?” This may seem a simple and straightforward question. We glance at our watches or at the clock on the wall and give an answer. In fact our answer to this question reveals a great deal about our worldview. We often conceive of time as a commodity,…
In their recent study of patristic interpretation, John O’Keefe and RR Reno point out that Irenaeus borrows his notion of recapitulation from ancient rhetoric: “Recapitulation is an English form of recapitulans, the Latin translation of anakephalaiosis, which means final repetition, summing up, drawing to conclusion. As a term in rhetoric,…
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