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…
Showing page 44 of 309
Showing page 2 of 43
David Cunningham writes, “What was one a ‘kiss of peace,’ uniting bodies in an almost frighteningly intimate way, now often consists only of a tentative handshake and a mumbled greeting.  Of course, this does still provide an opportunity to meet the other face to face, body to body; and so…
In his Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (1989), Thomas Wiedemann remarks on the difference between pagan and Christian conceptions of infant death: “For the pagan, premature death was a disaster because the child’s life was wasted; for Augustine, a child who died prematurely might have had as complete…
A friend, Aaron Cummings, writes in response to my comments about Derrida and prodigal words: “A few days ago, you alluded to Derrida, that words run prodigal from the speaker/writer. You said that this was true of Mankind’s words, but not of God’s. It seems to me that this is…
For Athanasius, creation’s multiplicity is not a defect but part of its glory.  No created thing supplies all need; no single light illuminates day and night.  So there are many lights.  Each light is its own essence, but these essences cooperate to fill what is lacking in the others.  The…
Arianism is not just about Christology.  It’s about theology proper. Arius said that God made His Son before the creation because the creation could not endure the “untempered hand” of the Father.  It needed the Son as mediator.  Athanasius sees in this a false idea of God.  God, He says,…
Athanasius notes that before the incarnation humanity was under the dominion of false gods, enslaved to corruption and idolatry.  The Word took flesh to deliver us from that slavery, and the form of that deliverance was an act of worship: “in this body offering Himself for all, He might deliver all from false worship and…
Showing page 1324 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
