Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Below is an excerpt from Mark Horne’s manuscript from his forthcoming commentary on Ephesians, specifically on Paul’s reference to Christians as “saints” (Ephesians 1:1). “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus.” Paul greets…
There was nothing in the ark except the two tablets that Moses put there at Horeb, where the LORD made a covenant with the people of Israel, when they came out of Egypt (2 Chronicles 5:10). When Solomon finally brought the ark of the covenant to the finished temple in…
In As You Like It , Shakespeare famously describes the seven ages of a man’s life. The division of man’s life into stages is not an invention by Shakespeare, nor merely a common medieval artifice, but an expression of the real journey taken in life. Shakespeare seems to divide up…
Is there a chief characteristic which best illumines the image of God in Man? What is it exactly that makes Man as a lens through which to see God? Moses thoughtfully and deliberately escorts the reader to the characteristic showcased above all else: humility. Though much ink has been spilled…
Note: This essay is adapted from a talk delivered at the Howell E. Jackson Committee conference on “Foundations of Baptist Education,” held at Union University, Oct. 4-5, 2024. It’s no secret that evangelicals are converting to High Church traditions, a term I will use to refer to Anglo-Catholicism, Roman Catholicism,…
In recent years, there has been a flurry of conversions from Protestant Christianity towards Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, at least in part due to their supposed early church heritage relative to Protestantism. In the words of Rod Dreher, a former Methodist who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, “Many evangelicals seek…
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Adorno writes that enjoyment is not the be-all of art.  Certainly it isn’t for the producers of art: “If you ask a musician if he enjoys playing his instrument, he will probably reply: ‘I hate it’ . . . People who have a genuine relation to art would rather immerse…
Soteriology is eschatology, and that means soteriology  has to have an already/not yet structure.  Rejecting either justification by faith or judgment according to works breaks the bond of eschatology and soteriology.  Another way to say this is soteriology is about what happens in time . The alternatives are: 1) Antinomian:…
Commenting on the “seal” in Song of Songs 4:12, Luther writes, “In the same way we Christians are now sealed by the Word, Baptism, and the Sacramental of the Altar, by which we are distinguished from all other races, not just before the world, but rather in God’s own judgment.”…
In his classic essay on the “work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Walter Benjamin made some trenchant observations on the way film affects actors and audiences.   Importantly, he believes these effects are not the result of some perversion of the medium of film, but inherent in…
Paul Niskanen has an insightful analysis of Genesis 1:27 in the latest JBL .  He starts with the question of whether Barth’s view that the image of God is found in relationality and specifically in sexual difference has any exegetical support.  He reviews the current discussion, and notes that there…
Ouch!  Schaeffer again, this time on Heidegger’s interpretive methods: “Paraphrase, translation, dismantling of the syntax, making the text autonomous with regard to the concrete subject who utters it, absolute silence regarding the poetic form: to these five characteristics we must add hermeneutic authoritarianism,” the last of which “postulates an opposition…
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