Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Integrity seems to have two meanings. It can mean the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. A man of integrity is a person of honour, rectitude and probity, truthful and trustworthy. Integrity also describes a state – the quality of being whole and undivided. If things are…
Get the Psalm 32 Translation here Psalm 32 is the first part of Ps. 32-33, ending with a call to praise that is answered by what follows. Ultimately the psalm needs to be considered as a whole, but what we call Psalm 32 does have its own structure and logic,…
You wouldn’t hit a man with glasses would ya? No, of course not. I’d hit him with a bat. In our culture of frivolity it is tempting for Christians to think that solemnity should be our defining attribute. The coarseness of the world impedes us from enjoying any sort of…
Taking a cue in my last post from early Christian apologetics, I suggested that if we wish to articulate and defend a doctrine of creation ex nihilo in contemporary theology, we would do well to offer a thick description of Yahweh’s divine monarchia (his sole rule or sovereignty). Rather than…
I’m not sure we really understand the insidiousness of unbelief. It is not merely to reject the gospel of Jesus, the existence of a Creator God, or to question biblical morality. At its core, unbelief is ingratitude, and by the very nature of this ingratitude, it must ultimately reject every…
Mark’s narrative of the baptism of Jesus is characteristically brief: “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him…
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B eginning in 1559, the magistrates of the German city of Wesel, in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, required the citizens to commune together (Jesse Spohnholz, “Multiconfessional Celebration of the Eucharist in Sixteenth-Century Wesel”). The city had been the site of intra-Lutheran struggles, and Calvinist immigrants were moving in. Worried about…
M olly Ball's Atlantic piece on “ America’s empty-church problem ” is a must-read. It provides a penetrating, and sobering analysis of the political shifts that came to the surface in the 2016 Presidential election. Trump's election was not , she argues, the triumph of the religious right or the…
M atthew Bates argues in Salvation by Allegiance Alone that “our contemporary Christian culture often comes prepackaged with functional ideas and operative definitions of belief, faith, works, salvation, heaven, and the gospel that in various ways truncate and distort the full message of the good news about Jesus the Messiah…
A fter summarizing recent work on temple building in the Ancient Near East ( 1 & 2 Chronicles , 227–229), Mark Boda takes note of the differences between the accounts of Solomon's temple building in Kings and Chronicles, with an eye to the question of whether or not the Chronicler…
I n the blink of an eye, globalization has changed from the inevitable future and the panacea for all human ills to a curse word and the source of all American misery. It takes guts to speak up for globalization these days. Brent Waters has guts. He no doubt began…
P aul said that God gives us abundantly more than we can ask or imagine, according to the resurrection power of Jesus in us (Ephesians 3:20). Solomon could have told us as much. When Yahweh appears to Solomon at Gibeon, He offers to give the king whatever he asks (2…
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