Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In my last essay, we saw how consumer culture has gutted the familial category necessary to understand the church. When a consumer visits a church, he expects another service-provider, such as a hospital or a restaurant. He doesn’t understand the role of men in ministry, and thus, not the role…
First time visitors to our church sometimes express their surprise that children, even the youngest, participate with their parents in the entire worship service. Many congregations created an expectation for the parents (and children) of Sunday School or Child Care being available during the entire worship service or during the…
Quantifying the Love of God “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” ~ John 3:16 This most beloved verse in all the Bible was spoken by the Savior himself to Nicodemus. As…
While The Lord’s Prayer enjoys wide recognition throughout the Church, its richness and depth may be unrealized due to a lesser familiarity with, what I will argue is, its primary inspiration: the Tabernacle. There, Christ’s intent can rightly be discerned. The Prayer’s methodological correction to the Jews and Gentiles wasn’t…
The Consumption of the Covenant Idea of the Church Last time we saw consumerism, having canalized its attitudes in our culture, shapes what the consumer sees when he or she steps into a church. Here, we’ll see how it has eviscerated the covenant and familial ideas necessary to understand the…
The ignoble Jayber Crow can stir your appetite for the noble. It’s the simplicity of a good ol’ Port William boy that builds the charm of the book. In fact, the elitists in Port William receive the harshest blows and severest outcomes, as they should. But before delving into the…
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Barth ( CD 1.2) gives an powerful exposition of the crucial importance of anhypostasis and enhypostasis as Christological concepts. The first refers to the “impersonal” character of the human nature, and the second to the notion that the human nature exists only as the human nature of the Son. Barth…
The Dalai Lama’s comments about sex, inevitably, grabbed the headlines. But I found something else he said at a Lagos press conference the other day more arresting: “Too much attachment towards your children, towards your partner,” is “one of the obstacle or hindrance of peace of mind.” It’s ancient wisdom.…
Charles Barber ( Comfortably Numb ) writes, “In 1916, Dr. Henry Cotton of Trenton State Hospital, believing that germs from tooth decay led to insanity, removed patients’ teeth and other body parts, such as the bowels, which he thought might by the causes of their madness. In so doing, he…
Walker Percy wrote in Lost in the Cosmos (foreseeing the craze for antidepressants): “Assume that you are quite right [to be depressed]. You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth - and who are luckily…
Two fatherless boys - Will, a pious member of the Plymouth Brethren, and Lee, the school’s bully and bad boy - find stability and hope when they become blood brothers and make an amateur Rambo spin-off. It’s a promising premise, but Son of Rambow doesn’t carry it off. The problem…
Barth brilliantly notes the links between Zizendorf, the quest, and the cult of the sacred heart of Jesus. All, he claims, involve a devotion to the human nature of Jesus as such. Zizendorf’s preaching showed “peculiar interest in the creaturely sufferings of Christ.” And “we have here the precursor in…
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