Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I was still a high school student the first time I read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but I will never forget the powerful impact the book had on me. Of course, as a second year student, I did not fully digest the book. In spite of subsequent readings, I…
Crises force questions of identity. Identities may remain assumed until some event, or series of events, challenge what may have been taken for granted. The search for identity is an anxious one precisely because it tends to happen in times of upheaval and uncertainty. In his recent book, Orthoxox Anglican…
Peter Leithart recently wrote a fascinating short piece about the Half Shekel Temple Tax as an atonement. Leithart argues three main points. First that the Sanctuary Shekel was heavier, i.e., more valuable than the everyday shekel. Second, he offers some analysis about the order of magnitude of the purchasing power…
There is no denial from the careful reader that 1 Samuel 24 and 26 are telling the same story. Perhaps we should say, virtually the same story. But that the stories are cut from the same cloth is undeniable. What we have over these three chapters—1 Samuel 24-26—is a very…
In his novel That Hideous Strength , C.S. Lewis is able to masterfully illustrate in narrative form so many of his insights about the subversive dangers of Leftist political dogma to Christian civilization. Perceptive essays from Lewis like “The Abolition of Man” and “The Inner Ring” are fleshed out in…
At a very practical level, the Evangelical Church has been injected with counterfeit spiritualities. We are a people looking for a city, whose builder may only be in office for four years. Our temptation to veer to the side of the temporal is striking in our day, especially as the…
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At the center of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches about three duties of Jewish piety – alms, prayer, and fasting. Regarding the last, He says, “when you fast, do not put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites, for they render their faces unrecognizable in order to be…
This Friday and Saturday, the Theopolis Institute will host the third annual Nevin Lecture series. The Nevin Lectures are an exercise in what Paul Murray calls “receptive ecumenism.” Each year, Theopolis invites a theologian, pastor, or thinker from outside our Protestant Reformed tradition to lecture about what divides us. We…
Revelation has several lists of social classes. The first is given when the Lamb opens the sixth seal and the world starts coming apart at the seams (6:12-17). There is another when the land beast imposes his mark on every class of society (13:16). The last comes after the Rider…
Esther is a dramatic story of God's rescue of the Jews, His clever inversion of Haman's plot, the courage of Esther. It is also an exodus story. Haman the Agagite is a Pharaoh who wants to wipe out all the Jews. Ahasuerus, fortunately, is an anti-Pharaoh who works to protect…
A number of people have raised objections of different sorts to my posts on Protestants and writing. In the nature of the case, I'm not going to resolve these issues with a blog post or two, and it would be passing tedious to answer every criticism of every critic. The…
In a 1962 article in JBL , Houston Smith traces the connections between Exodus and the gospel of John, focusing attention on the parallels between the plagues (signs and wonders) performed in Egypt and Jesus' signs. There are not only parallels between individual plagues and Jesus' signs but, Smith argues,…
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