Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
References to the Son of Man coming on the clouds occur five times in the Synoptic Gospels. Three times such expressions appear in the parallel accounts of the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24:30; Mark 13:36; Luke 21:27). Then, in parallel accounts of Jesus’ trial before the leaders of Israel, such expressions…
Just what the difference is in the work of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament and the New Testament is a question not so easily answered. The distinction is often said to be that in the Old Testament the Holy Spirit is on the believer, but in the New…
1. Introduction You should think of 1917 at church on Sunday. Why? Let me explain. There's one film every Oscar season which everyone seems to have watched—your parents, your colleagues, even your pastor. This year, it's 1917— Sam Mendes' WW1 epic following two British Tommies on a seemingly impossible quest…
This piece was originally part of the Bowyer response to the Theopolis series surrounding Professor McDermott’s essay, “Rethinking Israel.” For the sake of brevity, it was removed from the initial response, to be published as a standalone piece. As we’ve argued previously , we are strongly supportive of the right…
Richard Bauckham’s groundbreaking work, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony , is profoundly insightful, but the message of the book is hampered by the presupposition of Marcan priority. Ironically the place where this assumption perhaps does its most damage is in Bauckham’s discussion of the apostle Matthew…
The Protestant Reformation was defined by certain clarifying disagreements between the medieval Church and those who came to be known as Protestant Reformers. Chief among these was the nature of justification: whether one was justified by works, or by faith and works, or—as Martin Luther contended—by faith alone. Now over…
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Materialism is "good news," according to Stephen Greenblatt, since it shows us the truth of "human insignificance" and dispels enchantment. We're liberated from sacred boundaries to do what we like. Rusty Reno, who quotes this from Greenblatt ( Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society , 148) considers this a…
Paul Gottfried ( After Liberalism ) points out that liberalism doesn’t mean one thing. It “has not been allowed to keep any fixed and specific meaning. It has signified dramatically different and even opposed things at different times and places in the course of this century, from a defense of…
In his Lectures on Godmanhood , Vladimir Solovyev isolated the inner contradiction of 19th-century conceptions of human nature. On the one hand, "contemporary man is aware that he is internally free, deems himself to be higher than any external principle independent of him, asserts himself as the center of everything."…
Many commentators have noted the similarities between Josiah's death (2 Chronicles 35) and that of Ahab (2 Chronicles 18). Christine Mitchell argues, however, that commentators often miss the irony of the Chronicler's account, and some of the other precedents for Josiah's death. One irony has to do with the location…
Robert Heimburger's God and the Illegal Alien is a careful, theologically-informed treatment of American immigration law. He provides detailed overviews of the development of immigration law, including the origins of the concept of a legal "alien," sketches a theology of politics with the help of "Barth's biblical theology of the…
In his monograph on Aliens in Medieval Law , Keechang Kim notes that the distinction of citizen and "alien" replaced the earlier binary of "free" and "unfree" during the later middle ages. He cites John Fortescue's De laudibus legum Anglie (c. 1468-70), which argued that ""Hard and unjust (crudelis), we…
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