Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
There’s something about joy that is infectious. And occasionally, we all have the opportunity to be in someone’s presence who is so happily engaged in their work, so joyous in their pursuits, that we want to learn from them. We want to know where that joy comes from and attain…
Jesus has told us that He intends all nations to be discipled. Nations. Not just individuals. All nations as theocracies. That being the case, the Church exists for the life of the world. Being baptized is not only a matter of becoming part of a new family, it is also…
Harold Bloom’s essay on Macbeth includes the kind of penetrating insights that make Bloom the great Shakespearean scholar that he is, but it also includes his typical and intense anti-Christian bias. “If Lear was pre-Christian, then Macbeth is weirdly post-Christian. There are, as we have seen, Christian intimations that haunt…
Revelation 16 is a day of atonement text. The tabernacle of the testimony has been opened (15:5). The angels who receive the bowls are clothed in linen (15:6), the clothing of the high priest when he goes into the sanctuary on the day of atonement (Leviticus 16:4). The temple is…
From time to time, when I’ve lectured on how to read the Bible, I’ve used art-music as one example thereof. When we listen to a simple folk song, we hear the same melody over and over again, but this is not how composers write "high" music. Let me amplify. A…
"For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea-monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). Some reflections on Jonah’s Big Fish have led to the following essay. Let me…
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In a spirited reply to Philip Davies' Whose Bible Is It Anyway? , Francis Watson takes aim at Davies “call for a strict separation between theological and academic modes of biblical interpretation” (3). Davies complains that believers study the Bible according to an insider approach (emic), while academic scholarship requires…
Jane Austen “did things with characerisation, with dialogue, with English sentences, that had never been done before,” writes John Mullan in What Matters in Jane Austen? (p. 2). That she wrote novels is not surprising. That she wrote in such utter isolation is more so. That she wrote with such…
According to Kimberly Hope Belcher ( Efficacious Engagement , 77), “Augustine seems to have been the first commentator on baptism to seriously consider whether the rites of initiation he knew, which were used for both adults and children, applied equally well to both.” He concluded that they did apply, and…
Brian Gregor's A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross isn't “a specifically Lutheran anthropology,” but Gregor does think Luther “demands philosophical attention.” Luther influenced Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, and these influenced Ricoeur and Bonhoeffer. Post-Heideggerian Lutheran theology also, of course, bears the marks of Luther's influence (8-9). Gregor's book is…
Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert's Helping Without Hurting in Church Benevolence is a handbook to help churches give aid to low-income people. It explains how to create a policy and philosophy of benevolence, how to build the church's capacity, and offers training scenarios, questionnaires and lots of lists. It truly…
Derrida is old hat these days, but he's still a thinker worth wrestling with, worthy of better than the dismissal he often gets from some writers. His deconstructive techniques can be put into the service of theology. In his crucial essay, “Plato's Pharmacy” he offers what he describes as a…
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