Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Evangelistic Message to the Uninformed: 1 Timothy 3.14-16 Even though this is written as a sermon for delivery, and even though it was preached in a homiletics class, I decided I can’t post it as a sermon because it was not truly preached at a place where nonchristians wanted to…
If we only read the Gospels of Mark and Luke, we might get the impression that Jesus’ ascension was on resurrection Sunday. Matthew speaks of going to Galilee but he does not put things into a clear time frame. John shows us that Jesus appeared to the disciples eight days…
The most cursory glance at the history of Western literature reveals that it has been deeply influenced by the Bible. Some of the greatest classics of Western literature draw their plots, characters, and ideas largely from Scripture; Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost are two of the most notable…
Few themes emerge as profoundly and persistently in the streams of biblical narrative as the conflict between light and darkness, and the juxtaposition of humanity with monstrosity. These themes not only weave through the fabric of Scripture, emerging in stories from Genesis to Revelation, but also stitch together the human…
In John Wenham’s work, Easter Enigma , he devotes an entire chapter to Mary Magdalene, which is rephrased and summarized here. 1 One of the interesting things that Wenham said was that Mary Magdalene was the second “most favored woman in the Bible.” 2 He adds, “Yet apart from a…
God made man to live in a larger relational context, and even in high rebellion, man cannot escape his created nature. Instead, that nature takes revenge on rebellious man. Autonomous and alone, the self craves absolution but recognizes no authority that might give it; it thirsts for glory but rejects…
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Morwenna Ludlow ( Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern , 41-2) has some critical things to say about Robert Jenson’s use of Gregory of Nyssa, but she thinks he gets some things right: “Jenson is notable among systematic theologians in distinguishing clearly between the persons (or identities) of the Godhead…
For I will consider my cat Alice. (Not my cat; my daughter’s, though I pay her keep.) Alice is a servant of the living God duly and daily serving him. Mostly she serves by pouncing on my bed at the first glance of the glory of God in the East,…
God is the Father of precipitation, Job says (Job 38:25-30). Rain is filial, the Father’s nourishing gift to the world. The same imagery appears elsewhere. The righteous king is “like rain upon the mown grass” (Psalm 72:6), and the king’s “favor is like a cloud with the spring rain” (Proverbs…
In Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (19), TF Torrance warns about the inevitably psychologizing and anthropologization that occurs when “the witness of the evangelists and the other New Testament authors reposes ultimately upon Jesus’ own self-consciousness.” In the first place, such an approach “isolates his consciousness from his…
Barth cites this passage from the Epistle to Diognetus to emphasize the gentleness of God in His self-revelation in the Son. God sent His very son: “He did not, as one might have imagined, send to men any servant, or angel, or ruler, or any one of those who bear…
For Barth ( Church Dogmatics The Doctrine of the Word of God, Volume 1, Part 2: The Revelation of God; Holy Scripture: The Proclamation of the Church , 34), the incarnation reveals that God is free for us, pro nobis . But Trinitarian theology is the affirmation that is freedom…
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