Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
It is a well-known movie trope, the sports car drives up, a stiletto-heeled starlet steps out and the camera follows her leg up the prodigious slit of her dress, then it takes in the rest of her figure before settling on her face, usually primed and puckered for some pro-feminist…
The “personalist” understanding of the Trinity, articulated most influentially in the work of John Zizioulas, has fallen on hard times. Recent scholars have attacked Zizioulas’s idea that Cappadocian Trinitarianism represented an ontological revolution, hammering again and again the distinction between divine and human personhood. Michel Barnes’s conclusion is the most…
I sit here in my office and poke around on a keyboard that is not even physically connected to my laptop and characters appear on a screen. I have a phone in my pocket through which I talk to someone around the world, send a text message, and to which…
I want to give a pep talk. Nothing fancy, nothing clever. Jesus makes some astounding promises in Luke 11. I want to clear out the clutter and convince you to believe Him and to act on it. The chapter begins with Jesus praying and teaching His disciples to pray by…
Eleonore Stump in her book Wandering in Darkness invites us to re-read the story of Lazarus (John 11) from Mary’s perspective. Stump argues that the story of Lazarus is a story of Mary, since both Lazarus and Martha are identified by their relationship with Mary. The true ending of the…
In his introduction to The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift in Honor of James B. Jordan , Peter Leithart says this about him: “Jordan is an unclassifiable thinker because he is an unclassifiable person . . . he closes his eyes in ecstasy listening to Messiaen or Rachmaninoff . .…
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INTRODUCTION One of the earliest Christological controversies in the church was provoked by Nestorius, who denied that Mary was the “God-bearer” (Greek, theotokos). The controversy was not about Mary, but about the nature of Christ: Was the eternal Son of God born as a baby? Unbelievable as it was, the…
Luther was famously hostile to the book of Esther. Luther was also famously enamoured of the idea of the Deus absconditus, the hidden God. These positions are inconsistent: No book of the Bible better narrates the power and providence of the hidden God than Esther, which refrains even from naming…
Protestants, rightly, protest at a number of Roman Catholic claims about Mary. At times, Protestants distort and exaggerate Roman Catholic teachings. That is unfortunate, since the official Catholic teaching is objectionable enough by itself. And the errors of Marian doctrine reveal some of the underlying problems of Roman Catholic theology…
Luke 1:53: He has filled the hungry with good things. Luke’s gospel is a gospel of reversals. God chooses a humble young woman on the margins of Israel to be the mother of the Savior. While Augustus Caesar is reigning in Rome, Jesus is born on the outskirts of empire,…
Mothering an infant is a thankless task. First, you have to carry a large, heavy pouch wherever you go for a number of months. Then comes the agony of labor. The momentary joy of birth is immediately followed by the prolonged inconvenience of nursing, changing diapers, comforting an infant at…
In his fascinating book on aging and the brain ( The Wisdom Paradox , 2005), Elkhonon Goldberg focuses attention on the phenomenon of “pattern recognition,” the “ability to recognize a new object or a new problem as a member of an already familiar class of objects of problems.” With experience,…
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