Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
A couple years ago, I read Paul Graham’s ruminations on higher- and lower-level languages in Hackers and Painters . Although he’s talking about computer languages, his insights have bearing on biblical language and hermeneutics. So bear with me while I lay out some of the basic points, and then we’ll…
Toward the end of the Revelation, John sees a vision of a new heaven and a new earth. The old created order in Adam has passed away, and the new order under the lordship of Jesus has been established. Within this new creation John also sees “the holy city, the…
I have been talking with you about integration—an elusive, allusive, word, pregnant with something we long for. I have suggested that what might be rightly a natural longing has been exacerbated by our own modern Western milieu’s dominating devotion to bits and bytes, a prevailing sense of fragmentation. Fragmentation is…
Sunday morning found me kneeling at the foot of my bed, trembling, pebbles of sweat leaping off the edge of my brow and nose, and hitting the floor in front of me, but not from piety was I procumbent; though as a minister for over a decade, I had made…
In April of this year, President Trump issued a zero-tolerance border policy that separated families, specifically children from their parents who had crossed the USA/Mexico border be it illegally or as asylum seekers . In mid-June, Trump dropped this policy of splitting up families, however there are still children who…
During the Middle Ages, Joseph, the husband of Mary, was the butt of many jokes. Medieval theater and art often depicted him as something of a buffoon, decidedly marginal to the gospel story. In part, this was the unfortunate obverse of the exaltation of Mary; any man would suffer by…
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Ezekiel is the only OT writer to promise a “new heart” to Israel (18:31; 36:26).  He promises hearts of flesh in place of hearts of stone.  What has given the people of Judah hearts of flesh in the first place? Ezekiel 14:1-7 gives an answer: They have set (stone -…
Near the end of his recent Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults , Christian Smith summarizes the argument of a 1995 article by N. Jay Demerath of the University of Massachusetts.  Demerath writes, that the widely reported decline of liberal Protestantism may in fact signal…
Athanasius appeals to the baptismal formula to show that the Son must be Creator: If he re-creates in baptism along with the Father, He must have created from the beginning.  But this raises the question, Is the Father insufficient in Himself?  Athanasius, strikingly, does not answer by appealing to the…
Jesus says, “Take up your cross and follow Me,” which is to say, “Be willing to die with me.”  Instead the disciples flee. But it gets worse.  The word “sword” is used six times in Matthew 26:47-56, three times in verse 52 alone.  (Otherwise, Matthew uses the word only once,…
John Milbank throws down a challenging gauntlet to Protestants in the Afterword to The Radical Orthodoxy Reader .  He explains Radical Orthodoxy as a continuation of the attack on extrinicism launched by the nouvelle theologie .  Barth, he argues following the critiques of Przywara and Erik Peterson, “ignored both the…
Bonhoeffer shows how love of God and love for His creation can be reconciled by using a musical analogy: “God wants us to love him eternally with our whole hearts - not in such a way as to injure or weaken our earthly love, but to provide a kind of…
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