Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…
Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…
The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…
In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…
Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…
The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…
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“Atheism may have turned a corner,” writes Tom Roston at Quartz . He’s referring to Sam Harris’s latest, Waking Up , subtitled “A Guide to Spirituality without Religion.” It’s got Harris quoting Rumi, a Sufi mystic of the 13th century: “One day, you will find yourself outside this world which…
When John enters heaven, he sees several things “before the throne”: seven lamps that are the seven Spirits, a sea of glass like crystal, eventually a pile of discarded crowns (Revelation 4:5, 6, 10). Elders sit on thrones around the throne (4:4). He doesn’t see any altar. He also doesn’t…
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…
No one is justified by the works of law, Paul says, and supports the claim with what appears to be a paraphrase of Psalm 143:2. The Psalm says “for not righteous before your face are all the living.” Paul writes, “by the works of the law no flesh is justified”…
If God knows all that is going to happen, can I be free? Saying “No” creates considerable difficulties about our understanding of human nature. But if we insist on human freedom in such a way that excludes God’s foreknowledge, we face equally considerable difficulties, this time about God’s nature. Ryan…
Pannenberg’s notion of the ontological priority of the future may be difficult to grasp, but it falls into place when we realize that the scope of his ontology was “reality as a whole.” That may seem to add diffuseness to the vagueness of the original concept, but the two large…
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