Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Understanding Shakespeare’s Biblical references is vital for the interpretation of many, if not all, of Shakespeare’s plays. For Othello , it is especially important, not only because the interpretation of the play is contested among various approaches — feminist, homosexual, post-colonial, Marxist, Freudian, new historical, and others — but also…
Mike Allen of Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, scores some points in his review of The End of Protestantism . He lodges the fair complaint that my rhetoric sometimes outruns my evidence. He argues that more stress on the present reality of the church’s unity deepens the tragedy of division; divisions…
I begin with two observations. First, on any millennial view, the Christian account of history is progressive, moving from the garden to the city. It is eschatological not only in that there is an end, but that the end is a glorified beginning, not merely a return to origins. To…
The church is a new form of polity that erupts into the world as much as the Son of God comes into the world. It’s a real-world political alternative to the polities of the ancient world. It resolves many of the political dilemmas of the ancient world, though not simply…
In my last post , I explained how Baptists really have a “one-ordinance-one sacrament” ecclesiology. I said this: “what Baptists really believe, in modern parlance, is that there is one ordinance (baptism which is a sign or symbol only) and one sacrament (the Lord’s Supper in which feeding upon Jesus…
One of the most extensive and penetrating responses to the Yoder-Hauerwas attack on Constantiniansm is found in Oliver O’Donovan’s Desire of Nations , in a chapter entitled “The Obedience of Rulers.” O’Donovan defines the word “Christendom” as “a historical idea,” specifically “the idea of a professedly Christian secular political order,…
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James says that the law is a mirror. We think he means that we read the law, it shows us flaws and blemishes, and we are convicted of sin. That’s not the way the image works in James. The man who looks in a mirror and turns away is not…
Julian “the Apostate” saw how the Christian church grew “due to philanthropy to strangers, burial of the dead and seeming purity of life.” Pagans needed to catch up, and this meant charity: “In every city,” he ordered, “numerous hostels should be established that strangers, whether or not of our faith,…
No American writer of the last fifty years even approximated the luxuriance of John Updike. In its lengthy obit, the NYT cites this from an early short story: “Snow fell against the high school all day, wet big-flake snow that did not accumulate well. Sharpening two pencils, William looked down…
“One cannot serve God and the Emperor,” Tertullian wrote. Early Christians were anti-imperial then? Not necessarily. When Celsus charged that Christians would leave the Emperor alone against the barbarians, Origen protested: “We help the emperor in his extremities by our prayers and intercessions more effectively than do the soldiers. Just…
Early Christians did not call for abolition, and even after the empire became Christian much of the traditional Roman social structure remained in place. Yet, Hermann Dorries writest that Christianity provided Constantine and the Christian emperors who followed with “the possibility of gradual amelioration.” Considering the central economic importance of…
In his first interview as President, Obama told Al-Arabiya that America needs to learn to listen because “all too often the United States starts by dictating.” Does anyone honestly believe that American diplomats go into the Middle East and starts by ordering everybody around? Of course, US diplomats have a…
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