Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In a February blog post for the Theopolis Institute, Benoît Engel offers a thought-provoking challenge to the widely accepted five-discourse structure of Matthew’s Gospel, proposing a sixth discourse in Matthew 21:28–22:14 to reframe the Gospel’s chiastic center. As someone deeply invested in Matthew’s literary design—explored in my book Reading Matthew,…
Avoid foolish disputes, genealogies, contentions, and strivings about the law, for they are unprofitable and useless. Titus 3:9 Out of a deep love and care for the church, Paul tells Titus and those in the church to avoid four specific things: foolish disputes, genealogies, contentions, and strivings about the law.…
Theopolis publishes many polemics, especially on the Sacraments. This piece does not necessarily reflect the views of Theopolis, her board, or her editors. -JW Whoever touches the dead body of any person shall be unclean seven days.He shall cleanse himself with the water on the third day and on the…
There is in the United States and the Western World some sort of religious revival occurring. Gen Z men—males born between ca 1997 and 2012—are flooding back in to churches. USA Today noted that Gen Z men—and to a lesser degree women—attending churches more than their millennial predecessors and they…
The primary task of many Biblical scholars (as they see it) is to explain how and why the Biblical text acquired its final form—i.e., what source material it used, how that material was expanded/redacted, who expanded/redacted it, why they did so, what the weather was like at the time, etc.…
Galatians 5:5-15 For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love. You were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? This persuasion is not from…
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W hat is the Spirit’s role in justification—the justification of Jesus and of sinners? In Protestant theology, the Spirit is typically on the “subjective” side of justification. By awakening faith, the Spirit enables sinners to receive the justifying verdict of the Father who imputes the righteousness of the Son to…
My grandson screams and runs away from a butterfly, flutterflower, wings fine as petals. The butterfly, gentlest creature, flies on, perhaps abashed, perhaps, feeling manly for having made a child cry, to pick a fight with a Monarch.
A ccording to Romans 6:7, justification is God's liberating judgment that delivers the baptized from sin, death, and from the reign of injustice. By baptism, one is transferred from the realm of Adam to that of the Last Adam. As the latter half of Romans 6 teaches, the life of…
T he closer we look at “modernity,” argue Jean and John Comaroff in Modernity and Its Malcontents , the more “rapidly [it] melts into air” (xii, riffing on Marx). This is partly because there are always, and have always been, “many modernities” (xi). Modernity “becomes especially vague when dislodged from…
J ehovah's Witnesses refuse to salute the American flag. In the case of Minersville School District v. Gibitis (1940), the Supreme Court rejected the Witness argument that being forced to salute the flag was comparable to the Nazi demand that Germans acknowledge Hitler. Felix Frankfurther dismissed the analogy: “It mocks…
M aurice Glasman ( Unnecessary Suffering , 35–36) observe that the phrase “Christian Democracy” first appeared during the 1848 Paris uprising. From Lamennais, the Christian Democrats argued for democracy as a product of Christian teaching. Democracy provided a framework for negotiating competing interests in society and for the protection of…
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