Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…
Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…
The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…
The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…
This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…
If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…
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A fine statement from Iris Murdoch on the capacity of literature to seek and reveal truth: "I think that though they are so different, philosophy and literature are both truth-seeking and truth-revealing activities. They are cognitive activities, explanations. Literature, like other arts, involves exploration, classification, discrimination, organized vision. Of course…
Gavin Hyman ( A Short History of Atheism ) doesn't think contemporary atheists are aware of the origins and cultural conditions of their own unfaith. They suffer from "a lack of awareness of atheism’s own origins, of the historical, philosophical and cultural matrix out of which it emerged, of its…
In Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece , Rosalind Thomas surveys the current state of Homeric studies. In the background is the Millman-Lord thesis that the epics are the product of oral improvisation. Thomas discerns two schools: “On the one hand, the formulaic theory of Parry and Lord is being…
Thomas Schirrmacher ( God Want You to Learn, Labor, and Love ) outlines a Trinitarian conception of labor. Work, like all human activity, has its uncreated origin in God. We are able to work because we are made in the image of a God of labor: "In the Bible, man’s…
Robert Jenson addresses this perennial question ( Systematic Theology , 1.228-9) in a characteristically Jensonian fashion, by reminding us of the dynamics of discourse: "In all true mutual discourse . . . each must be both subject for and object of the other. As I am present to address you,…
The following was first published in 2011 at Firstthings.com . “By the twelfth century,” Christopher Page writes in his magisterial The Christian West and Its Singers (2010), “the Latin West could be imagined as a soundscape of Latin chant.” From the eighth-century alliance of Pope Stephen with the Frankish King…
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