Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I've pastored a very rural church for well over a decade. Our town has about 1,000 people and will never grow until Jesus returns. 38 people attend our worship on Sundays. Here's a quick list of what we’ve done to grow our church, and what I’ve done to survive pastorally.…
Thanks for sharing so honestly about your current crisis of creativity. I totally understand and relate to that; it’s happened many times in my musical life thus far, and I’ve begun to accept it as a normal rhythm of the creative process. I actually went through a serious dry spell…
The Broken Stones of Israel At Sinai, the tablets of the Law of Moses were broken and restored. The Old Testament is a history of “new covenants,” including that promised in Jeremiah and fulfilled in Zechariah. Ultimately, the vertical Oath and the horizontal Sanctions met in the death of Jesus…
Woe to the sinful nation. Woe to those who enlarge their estates and build their portfolios. Woe to the drunks. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil. Woe to the proud who are wise in their own eyes. Woe to Congressmen who pass unjust laws and to…
The interpretation of Romans 7:7-25 is notoriously difficult. Good scholars disagree on many aspects of the passage, but the central interpretative difficulty concerns the identity of the “I.” Is Paul referring to himself? Is Paul referring to himself pre- or post-conversion? Does the “I” refer to Adam? Is the “I”…
You board the Metra train at Arlington Heights station one afternoon, heading to downtown Chicago for some sight-seeing. As the train departs from the station, a man in jeans, a striped t-shirt, and a Kansas City Royals baseball cap enters your train car, and begins asking to see each passenger’s…
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INTRODUCTION John’s readers are in danger of being misled, and John writes to warn them about false teachers and deceivers. John is confident that his “little children” will be delivered from the deceivers because they have an “anointing” from God. THE TEXT “Little children, it is the last hour; and…
Christopher Insole wants theologians who attack “liberalism” to be more careful about what they’re attacking. He favorably cites Robert Song, who distinguishes the constitutional liberalism of Locke and Kant from the laissez-faire liberalism of Hayek from the welfare liberalism of Hobhouse. Fair enough. But Insole’s own definition of liberalism seems…
1 John 2:15-16: Do not love the world, nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. When John talks about “the world,” he’s talking, as we’ve seen, about a cultural, social, and political system organized in hostility or…
Cultures have traditionally been rivers (Z. Bauman). The current carries everyone along in the same direction, whether or not they like where they’re going. When someone asks, “Why are we going this way?” it’s a sufficient answer to say, “We always have.” The only way to go a different direction…
Modernity arose to tame the chaos and carnage of 16th and 17th-century European wars. To form a Europe reduced to formlessness, modern thinkers and politicians drew boundaries - the boundaries between Protestant and Catholic established in the Peace of Westphalia and the boundaries between religion and political life, among others.…
Katherine Newey suggests that “a class-based divide between popular culture and literary or ‘high,’ remaining to this day, emerged in debates over the reform of the theatre [in the 19th century]. Much of what still endures of the concept of ‘legitimate’ theatre in the early twenty-first century was formed out…
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