Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Inspired by the “Moscow Mood” Debate In a shocking 1961 study, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram would don an official-looking white lab coat and tell a volunteer to administer increasing shocks to another “volunteer” in an adjacent room strapped into an “electric chair” just out of sight. The shocks were incrementally…
My title and the substance of the article are borrowed from a section of David Wenham’s excellent book, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? I am appropriating ideas from the pages in his book which address the question, “Why Does Paul refer to Jesus’ Life and Ministry so…
Some of us may be familiar with the notion that the epistle of James is like a New Testament version of Proverbs or other wisdom literature. According to this line of thinking, the epistle of James (together with the other wisdom literature) is basically a collection of timeless sayings without…
This summer I started walking a long trail that ran north from our home. On my best days, I would walk a total of five miles at a brisk pace. This trail follows the power lines that serve a significant portion of North Dallas and stretches far past the two…
I am an Australian. I went to the American Academy of Religion mega-fest last year to meet up with some friends, to present a paper at a ‘science and religion’ panel, and to marvel at the sheer scale of how Americans do things. It was quite a ride. Looking at…
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 We evangelicals do not often understand the roles of men and women in ministry. Because our consumerist culture has gutted the notion of family as it was historically understood, all Biblical passages about women in church ministry (a familial organism) are almost incomprehensible to…
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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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