Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I was still a high school student the first time I read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but I will never forget the powerful impact the book had on me. Of course, as a second year student, I did not fully digest the book. In spite of subsequent readings, I…
Crises force questions of identity. Identities may remain assumed until some event, or series of events, challenge what may have been taken for granted. The search for identity is an anxious one precisely because it tends to happen in times of upheaval and uncertainty. In his recent book, Orthoxox Anglican…
Peter Leithart recently wrote a fascinating short piece about the Half Shekel Temple Tax as an atonement. Leithart argues three main points. First that the Sanctuary Shekel was heavier, i.e., more valuable than the everyday shekel. Second, he offers some analysis about the order of magnitude of the purchasing power…
There is no denial from the careful reader that 1 Samuel 24 and 26 are telling the same story. Perhaps we should say, virtually the same story. But that the stories are cut from the same cloth is undeniable. What we have over these three chapters—1 Samuel 24-26—is a very…
In his novel That Hideous Strength , C.S. Lewis is able to masterfully illustrate in narrative form so many of his insights about the subversive dangers of Leftist political dogma to Christian civilization. Perceptive essays from Lewis like “The Abolition of Man” and “The Inner Ring” are fleshed out in…
At a very practical level, the Evangelical Church has been injected with counterfeit spiritualities. We are a people looking for a city, whose builder may only be in office for four years. Our temptation to veer to the side of the temporal is striking in our day, especially as the…
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Near the end of his fifth oration, Gregory flies off into an ecstatic review of the Spirit’s work and titles.  It is in some ways standard pneumatology, but the overwhelming rhetorical flood has never been surpassed. “Christ is born; the Spirit is His Forerunner. He is baptized; the Spirit bears…
Gregory’s fifth oration again: Human nature “has a unity which is only conceivable in thought; and the individuals are parted from one another very far indeed, both by time and by dispositions and by power.  For we are not only compound beings, but also contrasted beings, both with one another…
From Gregory’s fifth oration, defending the divinity and consubstantiality of the Spirit: “What was Adam?  A creature of God.  What then was Eve?  A fragment of the creature.  And what was Seth?  The begotten of both.  Does it then seem to you that Creature and Fragment and Begotten are the…
In the second of his “theological orations,” Gregory Nazianzen catalogs the impenetrable mysteries of creation: “How is it,” he asks, “that the earth stands solid and unswerving?  On what is it supported?  What is it that props it up, and on what does that rest?” And then: “For indeed reason…
Cunningham again, arguing that a creation made by a loving Creator cannot be pure nature: “Traditionally, God’s long-term ‘involvement’ with an care for the world has been emphasized through the theological category of grace .  In creating the world, God wills into existence something radically other-than-God; but the world’s ‘otherness’…
In his brilliant, flawed These Three are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Challenges in Contemporary Theology) , David Cunningham notes how the doctrine of the Trinity implies retroactive causality: “At first, we might assume that a father precedes his son, both logically and temporally; but this is an illusion.…
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