Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Understanding Shakespeare’s Biblical references is vital for the interpretation of many, if not all, of Shakespeare’s plays. For Othello , it is especially important, not only because the interpretation of the play is contested among various approaches — feminist, homosexual, post-colonial, Marxist, Freudian, new historical, and others — but also…
Mike Allen of Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, scores some points in his review of The End of Protestantism . He lodges the fair complaint that my rhetoric sometimes outruns my evidence. He argues that more stress on the present reality of the church’s unity deepens the tragedy of division; divisions…
I begin with two observations. First, on any millennial view, the Christian account of history is progressive, moving from the garden to the city. It is eschatological not only in that there is an end, but that the end is a glorified beginning, not merely a return to origins. To…
The church is a new form of polity that erupts into the world as much as the Son of God comes into the world. It’s a real-world political alternative to the polities of the ancient world. It resolves many of the political dilemmas of the ancient world, though not simply…
In my last post , I explained how Baptists really have a “one-ordinance-one sacrament” ecclesiology. I said this: “what Baptists really believe, in modern parlance, is that there is one ordinance (baptism which is a sign or symbol only) and one sacrament (the Lord’s Supper in which feeding upon Jesus…
One of the most extensive and penetrating responses to the Yoder-Hauerwas attack on Constantiniansm is found in Oliver O’Donovan’s Desire of Nations , in a chapter entitled “The Obedience of Rulers.” O’Donovan defines the word “Christendom” as “a historical idea,” specifically “the idea of a professedly Christian secular political order,…
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An extract from a remarkable sermon given by Rev. Dr. Rufus Okikiola Ositelu, Primate of the Church of the Lord (Aladura) at the 1999 Tabieorar festival in Nigeria: Some of you may be asking the following questions: What can the touch of God do in your lives? How can you…
Jeff Cook's Seven matches Jesus' beatitudes with the seven deadly sins. The beatitudes, he says, “are a picture of the voids created by sin being filled in with the life of heaven.” They provide “eight pictures of resurrection” (26). So, being poor in Spirit is set against pride, envy against…
Like many young earth creationists, Kurt Wise ( Faith, Form, and Time ) argues that the world is created with the appearance of age. He creates stars whose light already reaches the earth, even though they are only an hour old; trees, not merely seeds, with tree rings. Isn't this…
Why is there something rather than nothing? is usually posed as a philosophical question, the ontological question. Kurt Wise ( Faith, Form, and Time ) poses it as a scientific question. According to current models of the history of the cosmos, “organisms have been in existence hundreds of thousands of…
Philip Zimbardo ( Man (Dis)connected ) claims that young American men have become habituated to “regularly experience stimulus” by excessive exposure to porn and video games. He calls is “arousal addiction,” and explains that “in order to get the same amount of stimulation, you need new material, seeing the same…
Babylon the great city appears in Revelation as a prostitute, offering her wine of passion to the nations (Revelation 14:8; 17-18). She resembles the prostitute from the book of Proverbs, Lady Folly. Both offer illicit love and the wine of passion (cf. Proverbs 7:1). Both try to seduce simpletons. Both…
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