Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I revisited Athanasius’s On the Incarnation in light of Advent this year. A particular passage struck me with a question that I hadn’t considered before. When addressing Adam’s fall, Athanasius says this: “If then there were only the offense and not the consequence of corruption, repentance would have been fine.…
There is much wisdom for kings in the first letter of Paul to the Church in Corinth. As I am preaching through this letter, this is one of the major themes that stands out. That is the theme of the reign of the Christian as we live in union with…
1 The title should not be a surprise to anyone who believes the Bible to be true. According to the Bible, any and every faith and religion that does not conform to the Gospel of Christ are not only false, but ultimately inspired by false spirits. Though Jeffrey Niehaus is…
Names are weighty things, a fact repeatedly evidenced in the biblical narrative. There are several occasions when the names mothers or fathers chose for their children, and the reasons for which the names were chosen, are given extended attention in the text. Much of Genesis 29 and 30, for instance,…
Growing up, I was crestfallen about any Christmas that fell on Sunday. Christmas on Sunday meant going to church when I’d rather lollygag around the Christmas tree in my pajamas, playing with new toys. Christmas on Sunday was a drag. If I still felt that way, I know what I’d…
Growing up in the church in Southern America, there was an oft-used category for leaders in the church. It was a category which was used to justify a variety of rules and restrictions on church leaders. Leaders were to be “above reproach” and that meant not drinking in public or…
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“Atheism may have turned a corner,” writes Tom Roston at Quartz . He’s referring to Sam Harris’s latest, Waking Up , subtitled “A Guide to Spirituality without Religion.” It’s got Harris quoting Rumi, a Sufi mystic of the 13th century: “One day, you will find yourself outside this world which…
When John enters heaven, he sees several things “before the throne”: seven lamps that are the seven Spirits, a sea of glass like crystal, eventually a pile of discarded crowns (Revelation 4:5, 6, 10). Elders sit on thrones around the throne (4:4). He doesn’t see any altar. He also doesn’t…
Have you ever been to a wedding where the heavens opened and a voice declared the couple “husband and wife”? Few of us have. Beautiful as they are, most marriages are quite mundane. Yet when Jesus talks about marriage, He describes it as something that God does: “What God has…
No one is justified by the works of law, Paul says, and supports the claim with what appears to be a paraphrase of Psalm 143:2. The Psalm says “for not righteous before your face are all the living.” Paul writes, “by the works of the law no flesh is justified”…
If God knows all that is going to happen, can I be free? Saying “No” creates considerable difficulties about our understanding of human nature. But if we insist on human freedom in such a way that excludes God’s foreknowledge, we face equally considerable difficulties, this time about God’s nature. Ryan…
Pannenberg’s notion of the ontological priority of the future may be difficult to grasp, but it falls into place when we realize that the scope of his ontology was “reality as a whole.” That may seem to add diffuseness to the vagueness of the original concept, but the two large…
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