Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The 2002 Auburn Avenue Pastor’s Conference and the Assurance of Grace Recently, there has been some controversy over the presentations of four speakers at the Auburn Avenue Pastor’s Conference. Accusations have been made including a denial of justification by faith alone and something close enough to “baptismal regeneration” that it…
Today, many in the Reformed world view a meritorious covenant of works as essential to a proper understanding of the gospel. These theologians believe that God set up a program in the Garden by which Adam would merit eternal life and blessing by his obedience. These same theologians usually regard…
After I graduated from college in 1989, I spent a summer in the Atlanta area in Georgia learning that I was not cut out for construction work. Then I met George Grant, one of my favorite authors. He was working for a church in South Florida in charge of their…
One meaning of “righteousness” in the Bible is moral uprightness. Perhaps a more basic meaning would be faithfulness. For example, Psalm 96.13 praises God, saying: He will judge the world in righteousness, And the peoples in faithfulness. In Hebrew poetry two lines often say the same thing using different words.…
I once saw “eschatology” defined as the study of edible French snails. But it really means the doctrine of the last things in Christian theology. In American Evangelical culture it is usually reduced to science fiction stories. But for the Apostle Paul it was actually the key to the Christian…
To understand the view of Nicholas Thomas Wright regarding Christ’s work of redemption, one must begin with the centrality of Adam to the plight of the human race. Anyone who has heard Wright’s lectures on Philippians will not be able to forget his haunting appeal to Genesis 5.3 as a…
Showing page 233 of 309
Showing page 29 of 43
Revelation seems to be the province of fundamentalists, dispensationalists, popapocalyptics. It's far too cartoonish, stark, violent, demanding to be at home in the mainline. Craig Koester ( Revelation and the End of All Things ) points out that mainline churches actually hear very little of the Apocalypse in church. The…
Yahweh brings a devastating judgment on His own people and on Edom, slaughtering and destroying them. He empties the land of Edom, and fills their cities with wild animals (Isaiah 34-35). What has this got to do with us? Everything. What Isaiah depicts is a figure of the gospel story.…
God only speaks twice directly to the reader in Revelation, Craig Koester points out ( Revelation and the End of All Things , 51). He says the same thing both times: “I am the Alpha and the Omega . . . who is and who was and who comes, the…
You get the gist of Rajan Menon's argument from the title of his forthcoming book: The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention . The position he opposes is based on the assumption that the end of the Cold War fundamentally altered geopolitical conditions, and that our contemporary interconnected world is converging toward…
Janine Barchas ( Matters of Fact in Jane Austen ) says that Austen's world had a nascent celebrity culture. Baronets were well known; court scandals made news. There was an 18th-century equivalent of the National Inquirer and paparazzi. Austen knew this world, and she makes references to it in her…
In The Myth of Liberalism , John Safranek observes that recent Supreme Court decisions identify freedom with autonomy: “both restrain the government from interfering with an individual's personal and self-defining decisions” (109). As the majority said in Casey , the right to self-definition is “at the heart of liberty,” such…
Showing page 346 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
