Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Paradosis Center at John Brown University in Siloam Spring, Arkansas, put on its first conference last week, it was a remarkable event. It was an ecumenical conference including Orthodox (John Behr, Edith Humphrey, others), Catholic (Rusty Reno, Michael Root, others), and Evangelical (Timothy George, David Lyle Jeffrey). Unusually for…
Naphtali Meshel observes in his new The "Grammar" of Sacrifice that scholars have been talking for decades about the "grammatical" character of ritual and sacrifice in general, but have never actually analyzed a specific ritual or sacrificial system grammatically. Some even talk about a "universal grammar" of sacrifice "even though…
Some Christians are rather breezy about the problem of evil. We shouldn't be. Do I need to remind you of the grisly beheadings that have taken place over the past few weeks? Do I need to remind you of the blood of innocents that’s been spilled in our own country?…
Have you ever been to a wedding where the heavens opened and a voice declared the couple “husband and wife”? Few of us have. Beautiful as they are, most marriages are quite mundane. Yet when Jesus talks about marriage, He describes it as something that God does: “What God has…
Jesus is the last and greatest of the Prophets. He is the Prophet that Moses predicted (Deuteronomy 18). That means He gives the final word, brings the blueprints for the final temple, speaks the final world into existence, and has complete and permanent access to the divine court, where He…
Paul stands against those who are “troubling” or “disturbing” the Galatians churches ( tarasso ; 1:7; also in 5:10). The reference seems to be two great troublers from the Old Testament. First, Achan is described as a “troubler” for the problems he causes in the aftermath of the battle at…
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In an article in Bruce McCormack, ed., Justification in Perspective , Carl Trueman makes some helpful comments about the assumptions and consequences of Luther’s views on baptism and justification. “At the heart of Luther’s mature understanding of baptism,” he writes, “as with his mature understanding of justification, is a notion…
The following is largely inspired by Jon D. Levenson’s Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel . In his novel, The Death of Ivan Illych, Leo Tolstoy tells the story of the life and death of his title character. Ivan Illych is a government lawyer who has devoted his life to…
John 21:15: So when they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? He said to him, Yes, Lord; You know that I love You. He said to him, Tend my lambs. Jesus’ breakfast on the beach is a…
From beginning to end, from Alpha to Omega, God is a God of life, a God of resurrection. In the beginning, He called into being things that were not. He cried out into the darkness of the first day, so that light dispelled the darkness. He spoke again, and plants…
Resurrection life isn’t only for the future, not only for the end. Because Jesus rose on the third day, and because He poured out His Spirit on us, resurrection life has already begun to spread throughout this world of Sin and Death. Through Jesus and His Spirit, we already live…
More from Targoff, discussing Hamlet’s relation to the differing views of worship in the Elizabethan period. Targoff complains that “what is strikingly, and mistakenly, absent from our accounts of the Elizabethan settlement is precisely what the play interrogates in staging Claudius’s prayer: the belief that external practices might not only…
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