Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Understanding Shakespeare’s Biblical references is vital for the interpretation of many, if not all, of Shakespeare’s plays. For Othello , it is especially important, not only because the interpretation of the play is contested among various approaches — feminist, homosexual, post-colonial, Marxist, Freudian, new historical, and others — but also…
Mike Allen of Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, scores some points in his review of The End of Protestantism . He lodges the fair complaint that my rhetoric sometimes outruns my evidence. He argues that more stress on the present reality of the church’s unity deepens the tragedy of division; divisions…
I begin with two observations. First, on any millennial view, the Christian account of history is progressive, moving from the garden to the city. It is eschatological not only in that there is an end, but that the end is a glorified beginning, not merely a return to origins. To…
The church is a new form of polity that erupts into the world as much as the Son of God comes into the world. It’s a real-world political alternative to the polities of the ancient world. It resolves many of the political dilemmas of the ancient world, though not simply…
In my last post , I explained how Baptists really have a “one-ordinance-one sacrament” ecclesiology. I said this: “what Baptists really believe, in modern parlance, is that there is one ordinance (baptism which is a sign or symbol only) and one sacrament (the Lord’s Supper in which feeding upon Jesus…
One of the most extensive and penetrating responses to the Yoder-Hauerwas attack on Constantiniansm is found in Oliver O’Donovan’s Desire of Nations , in a chapter entitled “The Obedience of Rulers.” O’Donovan defines the word “Christendom” as “a historical idea,” specifically “the idea of a professedly Christian secular political order,…
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1 Peter 2:12: Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may on account of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation. As Pastor Sumpter has reminded us today, God visits…
John 20:21-22: So Jesus said to them again, Peace be with you; as the Father has sent Me, I also send you. And when He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit. In Scripture, water is often a boundary.  Israel exited the…
A funny thing happened on the way to mapping the genome, says James Le Fanu ( Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves ).  Humans have 25,000 genes.  That’s enough to get the job done, of course, but scientists were surprised to discover so few.  To transform an…
Athanasius’ treatment of Proverbs 8 is not convincing as exegesis, but as a piece of theology it is brilliant.  When Proverbs says that God “made” and “created” His Wisdom (in the LXX), it doesn’t refer, Athanasius says, to His nature but to His incarnation.  The Son of God is created…
Athansius of course thinks the Arians are wrong because the Son is eternal.  But one of his more intriguing, and satisfying, arguments is based on the biblical notion that the Son is the one through whom the “ages” came into being (Hebrews 1:2). Athanasius says, “every interval in the ages…
Is the church a polis herself?  Or a replacement for the pagan cults at the heart of the ancient polis? There might be another way to say it.  Erik Peterson ( Das Buch von den Engeln , 1935) points to the NT language about a heavenly Jerusalem of which Christians…
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