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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Psalm 128 promises a fruitful home to the man who fears Yahweh. He will prosper from the labor of his hands, with no one plundering or taxing away his goods. The assumption is that productive work is part of family life. The family is an economic unit, among other things,…
God gave us the book of Proverbs to teach us wisdom. Partly, He does that by teaching us the content of Proverbs. But he is also teaching us wisdom by the way He communicates wisdom. Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is the glory of kings to conceal a matter, but the…
Atonement theories can be seen as efforts to synthesize the grace and judgment of God: How does He show grace to a race that deserves condemnation. Solutions are often sought systematic syntheses, and there is something to that: The cross proves God to be just and the justifier of those…
Revelation is a confusing book for many readers, apparently endlessly, perhaps even drearily repetitive. The pyrotechnics and special effects might fascinate for a bit, but after a while it all blurs and blends and leaves us wandering in the bewilderness (David Sterritt's wonderful term). Can we find fixed points, coordinates…
We do what we do because we hope to accomplish something by our actions. All our actions are directed at the future. We want things to be different than they are now, and we plan and act in hope that we can make things come out differently than they otherwise…
Modern theology has often been obsessively concerned to justify itself to cultured despisers, and this self-justification has often taken the form of “prolegomenon,” the technical name for an introduction to a theological treatise. To the extent that prolegomena represent efforts to describe the work of theology and its place in…
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