Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Every advent of new media creates the justifiable reaction from some that the necessarily accompanied amputation may not be worth the extension made possible by the new tools. This is not unique to the Digital Age. Lamoignon Malesherbes, the French politician who was counsel for the defense of Louis XVI,…
A response to Gage Crowder's " The Hole in our Hope ?" Already, the first pages of the Bible promise a bright future. The story starts with the creation of heaven and earth, where heaven is perfect, but the earth is in a state of formless emptiness. Yet, God takes…
A rejoinder to Bubu Jarmulak's essay, " Embrace Pessimism ." Whereas calumnious critiques are reflections of more on the critic than the work criticized, good critiques are always opportunities for reassessment and improvement if they are received as such . Since its renaissance, the biblical doctrine of postmillennialism—or “optimistic eschatology,”…
Several decades ago, a pastor (and friend) mentioned in passing at one of our regular breakfasts together that he wasn’t satisfied with the usual reading of Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane, the usual reading being that Jesus asked the Father to avoid the Cross at Gethsemane. We turned to the passage,…
On May 21, 1604, the cathedral of Toledo in Spain held job interviews for the post of choirmaster, the head of music at the church. The position had been vacated when the previous occupant, Alonso Lobo, was poached by the nearby cathedral of Seville, and Toledo needed a replacement who…
Imagine — counterfactually: on the night he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus held up an empty hand and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant poured out for you. Drink of it.’ But there was no cup, no wine, nothing. If there’s no sign of the covenant, is there…
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Much of 2 Corinthians is Paul’s defense of his apostolic ministry, which is also a defense of the reliability of the gospel he preached at Corinth. One of the things that led some people to doubt Paul’s status as an apostle was his life of suffering. How can God be…
Suicide has been the province of psychiatrists, sociologists, moralists, theologians, and the occasional anthropologist (Durkheim). It has not gotten much attention from students of theater and dramatic performance. The contributors to Suicide as a Dramatic Performance assume that such a perspective can be illuminating - for some, though not all…
Jenson observes that “Israel knew itself as created by God's word, in the exact sense in which we until recently spoke of ‘a gentleman's word.' Yahweh made a promise and kept it, and just so Israel came to be.” Other nations could boast of “a visible and tangible presence of…
Robert Jenson argues in Unbaptized God that debates about justification regularly fail to notice the multivocal character of the word. Everyone knows that we have different views of justification, but we all believe that they are different “forms of teaching within the same locus of theology, that is, they are…
In the second volume of his Systematic Theology , Jenson raises pointed, Edwardsean questions about free will theodicies. Such devices suppose “that God once created and then somehow retreated, so that at least some things that happen within creation, those dependent on creatures' ‘free will,' he merely, as it were,…
Robert Jenson admits in a 2004 essay that in most of his theological writing he tried to do without the claim that Scripture is inspired. Historically, inspiration has been used to justify the authority of Scripture, but Jenson doesn't believe that use of inspiration is necessary. It's simply obvious that…
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