Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
That there is something wrong with the world is obvious. It does not take much time or brilliance to notice it. Once we get the feeling that we could imagine a better world, we are tempted to fix it or, if we cannot, to escape it. For both the world-fixers…
“Our Father in heaven,” what is man that we should be called your sons and daughters, beloved children of God Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, Yahweh of Hosts, the Ancient of Days. You are not a father preoccupied with work or engrossed in your smartphone; you are a present…
The Son of God took on human flesh and entered into the sin and suffering of our world. His life and teaching and suffering from His conception to His suffering on the cross teaches us a lot about how the good news enters into the world. Recently, I was teaching…
There is an unspoken rule about typology that permeates Evangelical thinking. It goes something like this: “If the New Testament authors don’t use an Old Testament character as a type, we don’t either.” There is a soundness in this reasoning, at least in a preliminary sense. There is no better…
In The world of Silence, Max Picard writes, “There does not seem to be any space left where there could possibly have been anything but noise. We take it for granted much as we take the air itself for granted. Everything begins and ends with noise.” Is it fair to…
God is Not There God is not in the book of Esther. Do a word search and you will get 0 results. Also try Lord, Yahweh, Prayer, Temple, or Sacrifice. Even names with God’s name in them, like Elijah, Jeremiah, or Daniel are missing. The fool says in his heart,…
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In his introduction to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age , James KA Smith sums up Taylor’s argument that the Reformation hastened the “disenchantment” of the world ( How (Not) To Be Secular , 38-9). Taylor’s summary of Calvin sounds like a summary of Barth: “The Reformers ‘all see the reigning…
John P. Burgess of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary spent a year with his family in Russia and recounts the experience of Russian Orthodoxy in his 2013 Encounters with Orthodoxy . It’s a very personal, sympathetic account. He describes Orthodox practices, and also some theology, in a way that I suspect an…
Willem van Asselt’s Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism provides a superb overview of the history of Reformed Scholasticism, as well as a survey of the current state of the literature. Early on, he emphasizes the “catholicity” of Reformed Scholasticism: “those who practiced it explicitly aimed to stand within the tradition of…
Benjamin Kaplan’s Divided By Faith is primarily a revisionist history of the rise of toleration in early modern Europe. He challenges the Enlightenment notion that 18th-century intellectuals introduced the idea, showing instead that toleration appeared first as a set of practices in religiously diverse regions of Europe and was first…
Lifts might not have changed everything, but they changed a lot, according to Andreas Berard’s Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator . The TLS reviewer observes how the elevator transformed architecture, and the class distribution of vertical space: “The lift allowed the dramatic recalibration of building types. Staircases were…
How did religion survive and revive in China? Answering that question in Religion in China , Fenggang Yang sketches the outlines of a political-economic sociology of religion. Like many sociologists of religion, he rejects the theory of secularization. Modernity has not proven to be the solvent of religious faith that…
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