Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the first installment of this essay, I offered the following chiastic outline of 1 Timothy: A. 1:1-2. Paul greets Timothy as a true child of the Faith, and blesses with grace, mercy, and peace. B. 1:3-7. Timothy is urged to command against heresy. C. 1:8-11. The reason the Law…
In the first installment of this essay, I offered the following chiastic outline of 1 Timothy: A. 1:1-2. Paul greets Timothy as a true child of the Faith, and blesses with grace, mercy, and peace. B. 1:3-7. Timothy is urged to command against heresy. C. 1:8-11. The reason the Law…
In the Bible, a memorial is something that brings God's promises and previous actions to mind, so that He can do them again. The rainbow is the model, set in heaven so that Yahweh remembers the covenant He makes with Noah (Genesis 9:13-15). God is light and dwells in a…
The First Epistle to Timothy fits neatly in the context of what King Jesus and the church are doing in the gospels, in Acts, Revelation, and all of the Apostolic Age in between. Paul writes to Timothy to encourage him in his work as a pastor in the “latter days,”…
I have been pastoring Cornerstone Reformed Church in Carbondale, Illinois since 1999. We are members of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), but have been practicing catholicity for many years, both personally and corporately. I’ve always believed that the Church of Jesus Christ is much more than the local…
Ecumenism is easy to talk about. It’s doing something to promote it that’s the problem. As a pastor in a town with churches of different denominations, all of whom love their doctrinal distinctions and are jealous to defend them whenever they perceive the slightest challenge, how can you be ecumenical…
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Davies and Allison point out in their commentary on Matthew that Mark uses the verb DIAKONEIN in 1:13 to describe the angel’s ministry to Jesus after His temptation. The word connotes “table service,” and they suggest that Jesus, hungered by fasting, feeds on the bread of angels, as Israel had…
Every week, we pray that our Father will not lead us into temptation, and that He will deliver us from evil. This is part of the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray, and the petition is reinforced by the promise of James: “Let no one say when he is…
Jesus’ temptation is a preview of the entire gospel. Jesus, the Son of God, becomes flesh, and enters the wilderness of this world, the wilderness that Israel has become. He assumed all human frailties and undergoes all the tests that Israel and all humanity have endured. He is “tested” or…
Shameless plug follows. Jim Manney of Loyola Press was generous enough to ask permission to reprint my essay, “Why Protestants Can’t Write” to The Best Catholic Writing, 2007 . As if I didn’t have enough troubles. The volume includes essays by real Catholics like Pope Benedict XVI (more Catholic than…
The popular picture of Calvin suggests that he was a theologian of truth, and that he subordinates God’s goodness and beauty fairly radically to His truthfulness. In his recent Notre Dame Press book on Calvin’s theology of Word and Image, Randall Zachman thinks otherwise: “I argue, on the contrary, that…
It is often thought that Hermeticism faded during the Christian Middle Ages, to be revived in the 15th century with Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum . One of the central claims of Florian Ebeling’s The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus (Cornell, 2007) is that this is misleading. There was…
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