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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W hen Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount, He is sitting on a mountain teaching about the law. He is a new Moses; He is Yahweh. To get the full force of the analogy, we should recalled that God reveals more on Sinai than the Ten Word or moral…
Mark Kulansky observes in his Salt: A World History that “Almost no place on earth is without salt. But this was not clear until revealed by modern geology, and so for all of history until the twentieth century, salt was desperately searched for, traded for, and fought over.” Salt’s importance…
When we read of Jesus’ “disciples,” we naturally think of the Twelve. But that’s not nearly as clear as we try to make it. Many Bibles include the heading “the first disciples” for the episode in Matthew 4:18-22, but the text never uses the word. Peter, Andrew, James, and John…
In a classic essay on the “Symbolic Significance of Salt,” Ernst Jones neatly summarizes how the natural properties of salt lend themselves to social and religious uses: “Salt is a pure, white, immaculate and incorruptible substance, apparently irreducible into any further constituent elements, and indispensable to living beings. It has…
H ow, Walter Rauschenbush asked in his Theology for a Social Gospel , does Jesus bear our sins? Unsatisfied with “imputation” as an explanation, he turned to a “social” explanation. Jesus was in solidarity with humanity, and human history is a history of sin. Humanity is bound in a enslaving…
In her contribution to J ustification in a Post-Christian Society (52), Christine Helmer summarizes the work of Birgit Stolt, who has examined Luther’s vocabulary of justification: “Through careful linguistic analysis, Stolt shows Luther’s doctrine of justification is not couched in the sterile dogmatic vocabulary of a cognitive appreciation for the…
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