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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P eter Harrison points out in his The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (10–11) that the Reformation coincided with the rediscovery of ancient skepticism. While the Reformers were undermining traditional Catholic sources of authority from one side, Montaigne and others were corroding certainty from the other. Descartes…
Karl Shuve's contribution to Apocalypses in Context traces the Christian use of Jewish apocalyptic, especially of the Book of the Watchers from 1 Enoch, which even makes it into the universal canon of the New Testament (Jude). The Watcher story appears in Justin, who “blames ‘every evil' on the Watcher…
Thomas Fabisiak wonders, What does the New Jerusalem have to do with modernity? ( Apocalypses in Context ). Ask most modern philosophers, and the answer will be, Not much. Fabisiak speaks of the “'rhetorical construction' of modernity” that takes the form of a dismissal or expulsion of apocalyptic and all…
In a 2011 New Yorker profile of Norwegian chess champion Magnus Carlsen, D.T. Max digresses to explain the logic behind the Soviet interest in chess: “Lenin, an enthusiastic player, made the game a priority for the new nation. In 1920, Alexander Ilyin-Zhenevsky, a commissar of Soviet chess, wrote that chess,…
In the middle stanzas of “Erotikos Logos,” watching someone else reading, Scott Cairns ( Slow Pilgrim , 278) writes, “So much, of course, depends upon your own willingness to find something worthy here, even as you bring - as you must - something worthy to the effort. So much of…
Andrew Pettegree ( Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion ) observes a shift in rhetorical tone in Protestant-Catholic debates between the early and mid sixteenth century: “While much of the polemical writing of Luther’s day was rumbustious in tone, making liberal use of ridicule and ad hominem attacks, it still…
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