Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For ye had compassion of me in my bonds, and took joyfully the spoiling of your goods, knowing in yourselves that ye have in heaven a better and an enduring substance. Hebrews 10:34 There is an old Puritan dictum that goes, “Sit lightly on the world.” George MacDonald places it…
As Genesis unfolds, God chooses a line of promise out of the nations. One by one its offshoots are peeled away as the story zooms in on God’s chosen people, Israel. First, the line of Cain is peeled away as Cain is sent out from the presence of YHWH. Though…
The following article was an address given to Anselm Presbytery (CREC) in the Fall 2024. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Pray with me. Father of Heavenly Lights and fount of all Wisdom, guide us we pray, by your Word and Spirit,…
At my age, I’ve given up on the fantasy of “keeping up.” Much of my reading is now narrowly focused, research-reading in service of writing projects. If you want bibliography on the ontology of artifacts in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas (which you don’t), or the purity laws of Leviticus, or…
I have been reading, thinking, and writing about the Internet and its effects upon our identities, communities, polities, and discourses for nearly a copy of decades. In that time, I have encountered no book as perceptive on the subject as Antón Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature…
Identifying the men Paul refers to as “enemies of the cross” in Philippians 3:18 turns out to be relatively difficult. Peter O’Brian speaks of “all kinds of suggestions regarding their identity,” and offers a list of interpretations: “moral libertinists, behavioural materialists, orthodox Jews, lapsed or apostate Christians—because of persecution, Jewish…
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The numbering of the sealed in Revelation 7 alludes to the census events of the book of Numbers. There, Moses initially numbers men twenty years and older, mustering them as the troops that will conquer the land. (The second census, in Numbers 26, includes women and has a different focus.)…
The “personalist” understanding of the Trinity, articulated most influentially in the work of John Zizioulas, has fallen on hard times. Recent scholars have attacked Zizioulas’s idea that Cappadocian Trinitarianism represented an ontological revolution, hammering again and again the distinction between divine and human personhood. Michel Barnes’s conclusion is the most…
Protestant soteriology claims to deal with perennial patterns of behavior and belief: Striving for approval from God by our performance, self-righteousness, works-righteousness, pride in our achievements, etc. Let’s grant that these are perennial patterns of behavior, though they will likely take various forms in different cultural settings. That’s not just…
Theodore Jennings ( Transforming Atonement , 158) observes that “what is visible on the grand scale of imperial political history also lodges itself in the dynamics of quite small-scale communities, including those that may seem to be, and may think of themselves as, and may even in important respects actually…
Markus Barth ( Acquittal by Resurrection ) sharply raises the question of the justice of God’s verdict of justification. How can God pronounce the guilty innocent, the ungodly righteous? Barth raises the stakes by insisting that the justice should be evident to all: “If after the proclamation of a verdict,…
Over at the Theopolis Institute site , I offer some reflections on the liturgical formation of culture through a consideration of the biblical anatomy of human action.
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