Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The corona virus hit Western society like a Biblical plague — almost. Biblical plagues were actually much more devastating. Still, as Peter Leithart describes the present situation, it is a judgment from God, because the disease itself together with our political solutions brought about a social situation that fits Deuteronomy’s…
“The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t affect anything, don’t mean anything. What makes anyone think that ‘theology’ is a subject at all?” - Richard Dawkins One cannot be a Christian college president or seminary trustee (your essayist is both) without wondering if Richard Dawkins’s notorious take-down of theology…
Nearly every church that I am aware of has adopted differing practices since the recent virus scare began. Some churches continued to meet during the state lock downs, and other churches left their building empty, meeting online through various video conference technologies. Some churches have gone back to life as…
Fear is an inseparable companion of human life. We are afraid of illness and death, poverty and cataclysms, rejection and betrayal, failure and shame. We are afraid of the unknown, so in a sense we are afraid of the future and life itself. Unless we live in the illusory belief…
In the title above, I put the word “heresies” in quotation marks because I would prefer that the word “heresy” be confined to erroneous beliefs about the Trinity and the Person of Christ, rather than be used broadly to describe any view that might be considered an error. 1 At…
I’ve been trying to work out why I’m feeling existentially disconnected from CoV-19-related fears. I’m taking it seriously, but it’s not registering in any deeply personal way. Partly it’s that my routines are largely undisrupted. But as I reflect on people’s reactions I think there’s more, because a lot of…
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Joshua Appel, pastoral assistant at Trinity Reformed Church, informs me that Aquinas’ argument from motion is not what many (including me) think it is. It is not an argument that God is the first domino in the line; rather, it is an argument that God is the universal magnet, the…
Barth has some excellent things to say about the Filioque (CD 1.1, 477ff): 1) He notes that Greek theologians as late as the 5th century explicitly affirmed the filioque. 2) He argues compellingly that the original form of the creed not only does not exclude the filioque. The procession of…
Calvin intriguingly says that the Spirit is the power of persistence and growth and life in creation: not merely the agent for the formation of things, but for their persistence. Spirit ensures the temporal endurance of the creature. As Barth summarizes, ?Both the existence of things, created for as chaos…
Barth argues that the Third Article of the Creed had to be finished before the church could truly wrestle with the doctrine of grace: ?It is logical that this doctrine [of the Spirit] had to be the last stage in the development of the trinitarian dogma. It had to be…
1 Kings 15-16 are a schoolboy’s nightmare. A king rises, a king reigns, a king sins, a king dies. Then his son rises, his son reigns, his son sins, and his son dies. And so on and on, indistinguishable kings with nearly indistinguishable reigns. Baasha’s dynasty repeats Jeroboam’s. And it’s…
Adherents to some form of the New Perspective on Paul are notorious for saying that the Catholic opponents of the Reformers were significantly different from the Jewish opponents of Paul, and that the issues Paul dealt with were not those of the Protestant Reformation. Reformers, on this view, addressed works…
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