Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Paradosis Center at John Brown University in Siloam Spring, Arkansas, put on its first conference last week, it was a remarkable event. It was an ecumenical conference including Orthodox (John Behr, Edith Humphrey, others), Catholic (Rusty Reno, Michael Root, others), and Evangelical (Timothy George, David Lyle Jeffrey). Unusually for…
Naphtali Meshel observes in his new The "Grammar" of Sacrifice that scholars have been talking for decades about the "grammatical" character of ritual and sacrifice in general, but have never actually analyzed a specific ritual or sacrificial system grammatically. Some even talk about a "universal grammar" of sacrifice "even though…
Some Christians are rather breezy about the problem of evil. We shouldn't be. Do I need to remind you of the grisly beheadings that have taken place over the past few weeks? Do I need to remind you of the blood of innocents that’s been spilled in our own country?…
Have you ever been to a wedding where the heavens opened and a voice declared the couple “husband and wife”? Few of us have. Beautiful as they are, most marriages are quite mundane. Yet when Jesus talks about marriage, He describes it as something that God does: “What God has…
Jesus is the last and greatest of the Prophets. He is the Prophet that Moses predicted (Deuteronomy 18). That means He gives the final word, brings the blueprints for the final temple, speaks the final world into existence, and has complete and permanent access to the divine court, where He…
Paul stands against those who are “troubling” or “disturbing” the Galatians churches ( tarasso ; 1:7; also in 5:10). The reference seems to be two great troublers from the Old Testament. First, Achan is described as a “troubler” for the problems he causes in the aftermath of the battle at…
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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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