Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Because of sin, the arts sometimes do not serve to glorify but to debase. Sinful men make their environments ugly, and create ugly art to “enhance” their ugly words. But since all men are still God’s images, no men are able to live with such ugliness all the time. Thus,…
Arts and literature reviews in most evangelical Christian publications generally approach their subjects in terms of ideology. We are told whether or not the film or book is acceptable in terms of morals, sexual graphicness, and theological accuracy. While there is definitely a place for such reviews, I fear that…
We speak of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The early Church tended to speak of Him as Father, Word, and Spirit. In this short essay, I want to suggest some other ways to think of the Trinity, ways that I have found pastorally helpful in my own life…
I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and fourth of those who hate Me, but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and guard My commandments (Ex. 20:5-6). The Second Word forbids acts of ceremonial…
8. The Table of Nations If we assume births every two years, and about 30 years between generations (cp. Gen. 11:12-24), we can come up with an approximate series of dates for the generations recorded in Genesis 10. We shall assume that all three of Noah’s sons had their firstborn…
Zechariah’s first prophecy (Zech. 1:1-6) was delivered in the eighth month of the second year of Darius. The notation of this date serves a number of purposes. Most obviously, it relates Zechariah’s prophecies to those of Haggai. By the time Zechariah delivered his first prophecy, Haggai had already chided the…
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D avid Goldman ( It's Not the End of the World, It's Just the End of You ) claims that the Global South is marked by two trends: “the fastest rate of cultural extinction in history as well as the fastest rate of Christian evangelization in history.” The two, he…
Once, writes Mark Greengrass ( Christendom Destroyed ), “Nobility existed to defend Christendom by force of arms. Knighthood was the institution founded by the Church for the purpose” (123). Changes in the technology of warfare, along with the breakdown of unified Christendom, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, undermined that…
The peerage seems a near-eternal fixture of European society, but Mark Greengrass ( Christendom Destroyed ) argues that it was a creation of the early modern period. Dukedoms and peerages “hardly existed before 1500,” but a century or so later “titled aristocrats had mainly taken over as the means by…
Mark Greengrass ( Christendom Destroyed ) observes that nearly everyone in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was in debt at one time or another during their lifetimes: “In Rome, for example, about 6 percent of the population found themselves imprisoned for debt in 1582 alone.” Court records provide further evidence: “Debt…
Os Guinness is utterly convincing, and characteristically wise, on many points in his 2014 The Global Public Square . He is right to emphasize that “many of the world's traditional settlements of religion and public life are floundering” (56). He refers to a UK case in which a woman was…
Andrew Walls ( The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History ) argues that Europe's encounter with non-Western peoples was one of the key factors in the secularization of Western politics. At a moment when Europe's hegemony over the world seemed secure, it came “by means of the expansion of the Iberian…
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