Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…
Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…
The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…
In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…
Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…
The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…
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Lessing on Hamann: “His writings seem to be tests of manhood for those who claim to be polyhistorians. They truly require a little knowledge of everything.” This from John Betz’s After Enlightenment: Hamann as Post-Secular Visionary , fresh out from Wiley-Blackwell.
NT Wright explains the meaning of the exaltation of the Son (Philippians 2): “It is the affirmation, by God the Father, that the incarnation and death of Jesus really was the revelation of the divine love in action. In giving to Jesus the title kurios , and in granting him…
The numerological structure of Philippians 2:1-2 is intriguingly complex. Verse 1 is explicitly structured by four conditional clauses, each introduced by “if” ( ei ). But this fourfold structure is crossed by a list of five nouns: paraklesis , persuasive address ( paramuthion ), koinonia , bowels, innards. And the…
During the 1870s, Bismarck’s Germany embarked on a legislative program that aimed among other things at secularizing education and resulted in a religiously pluralist Germany. This might look like progress in liberty and toleration, but the whole process was driven by anti-Catholic hatred and prejudice, and by fear about clerical…
Sanders’s work on Jesus is flawed by an odd adherence to conclusions the premises of which he rejects. In Jesus and Judaism he concludes that Jesus expected some kind of cataclysmic intervention by God in the future, yet also insists that he is suspending judgment about the form of intervention…
In a web article examining NT Wright’s arguments regarding Philippians 2:6, Dennis Burk writes, “If harpagmov be understood according to the above analysis, then Christ is said not to have snatched at or grasped for equality with God. Though he was himself true deity existing in the form of God…
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