Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Having spent time in a number of different kinds of churches/denominations over the years, it has been my observation that in every group there are those with a healthy catholic attitude toward other Christians and also those with a proud and condescending attitude toward others who call themselves Christians. If…
The BHrethren might be interested in this post I wrote on my personal blog which disagrees with John Gerstner’s understanding on the Church . Amid all the discussion of eschatology and hypercalvinism and how the visible church may properly be called the body of Christ, I completely overlooked how Gerstner’s…
How does one become a true judge? There are two trees in the Garden. One must first eat of the Tree of Life, which is purely a tree of grace, a gift. This is a tree that one has done nothing to deserve, and one must eat perhaps for a…
I just put up that first essay (#29 in a series) because I’d made some math goofs in the version mailed out, and I thought some other people would be interested. If this kind of study does not interest you, that’s fine. The Kingdom is a big place. Also, as…
. . . and the whole thing gets muddled. The words we traditionally use to translate Hebrew terms in the “sacrificial” system are confusing and often convey the wrong ideas. If we are going to understand Leviticus and the old world system of sacrifices and offerings, the first thing we…
I’ll start things off here. This year I’m preaching through the Gospel according to St. Luke. Over the past ten years I’ve preached through the Gospel according to St. Mark, St. John, and St. Matthew (in that order) in our morning services at Providence. It’s been eye-opening for me; and…
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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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