Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Christians get sex wrong when we start from the wrong end. We start from human desires, passions, biological drives and “needs.” These are treated as givens, as the base-line natural reality of human sexuality. Then we come to the Bible and find, to our surprise, that God places all kinds…
Why isn't Proverbs better known as the Bible's book on "manliness"? I use quotation marks because the term almost seems archaic in our present culture, along with "manhood." Perhaps the Church is too embarrassed to admit the Bible addresses that much attention to the topic. But another reason can be…
In certain evangelical Christian churches it is the tradition to exalt preaching above the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Ever since the rise of Revivalist preachers pushing for conversions, the practice has cast doubt upon the possibility of Baptism or the Lord’s Supper being a “means of grace”…
Perhaps one of the most stimulating sections of Yoram Hazony’s The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture addresses the question of how we are to discern the meaning of biblical narratives, especially how biblical narratives might present arguments of a more general nature. Hazony quotes John Barton’s remarks about the difficulty of…
In this slender volume, Joseph Minich (Ph.D. student at the University of Dallas) attempts to answer some of the deepest questions of human existence. With his honesty, his probing questioning, his wide reading, and his ability to plunge beneath superficial answers, he provides a helpful source of reflection for fellow…
A Closer Look at Noah’s Post-Flood Humiliation In Genesis 9:20-27 My wife is currently leading a Bible study through Genesis for a group of insatiable Bible students. Because she is a deep thinker and has a high view of inspiration, there is no passage she is unwilling to face head…
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James Jordan points out in an essay on the Ascension offering that the early chapter of Genesis follow a sacrificial sequence: Sacrifice outside the garden, then Enoch ascends to the Lord, then the world is washed in the flood, and finally Noah joins his forefather on a high place. This…
Michael Oakeshott says that the university provides one central gift, the “gift of the interval”: Here was an opportunity to put aside the hot allegiances of youth without the necessity of acquiring new loyalties to take their place. Here was an interval in which a man might refuse to commit…
In his social history of Christian Worship, Frank Senn summarizes the developments of the medieval period with regard to the Eucharist. He begins by challenging the assumption that medieval society was held together by “the church.” He notes that the church was often divided and conflicted, and that there were…
Eucharistic prayers were eventually removed almost entirely from the Eucharistic celebration, so that the church ended up, as Louis Bouyer has provocatively put it, “a eucharist in which there is no longer and eucharist at all properly speaking.” To grasp what Bouyer is saying, it is helpful to cite some…
Christoph Schwobel has a dense but helpful overview of Pannenberg’s theology in David Ford’s The Modern Theologians. Pannenberg insists from the beginning of his career that history is revelation, and his whole theology is an effort to hammer out the implications of that claim. Like Barth, he insists that revelation…
In his book on the Trinity, Veli-Matti Karkkainen has a concise summary of Pannenberg’s Trinitarian theology. He begins by noting that Pannenberg’s entire program for theology is to establish the “truth of Christian doctrine.” Theology is a public discipline that aims to establish universal truth claims. He protests against the…
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