Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For many people Christmas comes on December 25 and is over December 26. The tree is taken down along with the lights and the other decorations, and everyone begins setting the house in order for the new year. No more Christmas hymns. No more celebrations (well, until New Year’s Eve).…
The Ascension and the Incarnation should not be disconnected in our Christmas thinking or celebrations. As N.T. Wright notes, the ascension is "a central and vital feature without which all sorts of other things start to go demonstrably wrong. . . . where the ascension has been ignored or misunderstood,…
“In the Word was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness.” Thus John describes the incarnation of the Son. He comes as the living and life-giving light of the world. That’s good news. In the beginning, God spoke and light shone…
Christmas is all about Jesus. The angels announce Jesus’ birth, shepherds and wise men come to see Jesus, Herod wants to kill Jesus. We occasionally think of the Father who sent the Son, but we keep returning to the Son made flesh in Bethlehem’s manger. Meanwhile, as always, the Spirit…
Christmas is about many things, but one of the chief things revealed in the gospel of Christmas is the humility of God. We don't often think of humility as an attribute of God. If God is glorious and exalted, we think, He must be haughty and proud and self-centered. We…
John famously begins his Gospel with a piece of theology: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Matthew starts with a genealogy. John celebrates Advent with a hymn, Matthew with a list. For John, Jesus is the Word of creation…
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Drake notes that Burckhardt sees Constantine’s reign “exclusively in terms of a power struggle between Constantine and the bishops,” and shrewdly recognizes that this is in turn rooted in “an even older premise that the church became ‘worldly’ as a result of Constantine’s conversion and lost its spiritual purity.” That…
Was Constantine converted? Really, truly, deeply, irreversibly converted ? Not just converted, but converted converted? It depends on what “conversion” means. Arthur Darby Nock recognized that conversion has preconditions, but describes the actual event as a “chemical process” that involves the “addition of a catalytic agent” to produce a “sense…
Why celebrate Pentecost? Because the Spirit is the hovering wind that forms the formlessness, fills the void, brightens the darkness. Because the Spirit is the breath that gives Adam life. Because the Lord comes into the garden in the Spirit of the day to breathe out judgment to Adam and…
Dick Morris gives us another reason to be grateful for Obama’s election - he’s effectively muzzled and marginalized the Clintons. Hillary is Secretary of State, but Morris points out that “Obama has surrounded Hillary with his people and carved up her jurisdiction geographically. Former Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine) is in…
William Appleman Williams’s Empire As A Way of Life is a far from perfect book, but one of the striking things is the surprisingly open way America’s founders spoke of the US as an empire. “No constitution was ever before as well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government.”…
Drake’s title - Constantine and the Bishops - says a lot. Instead of the usual “Constantine and the Church” or “Constantine and Christianity,” Drake’s title implies that Constantine had to deal with real actors with their own motivations, agendas, passions, some of whom are as imperious as the emperor, some…
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