Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…
Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…
The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…
The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…
This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…
If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…
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In an 1873 article in the Mercersburg Review, E.V. Gerhart, a professor at Mercersburg seminary, argued that nineteenth-century views of baptism had departed radically from the viewpoint of the Protestant confessions: “Claiming to be the faithful representative of Reformational ideas, the religious press of our day, generally at least, denies,…
E.V. Gerhart argues in his 1873 Mercersburg Review article that the Heidelberg Catechism teaches that “Baptism makes the sinner a new man.” He explains: “The word ‘renewed’ in this connection . . . is to be taken as affirming a new organic relation of the subject of Baptism with Christ,…
At the beginning of her The Philosophical Question of Christ , Caitlin Smith Gilson sketches the multiple dilemmas of historicism. Historicism “takes the historicist out of history,” which is not only paradoxical but, on historicist terms, impossible, since outside history “there is no place to be” (xiii). How does this…
Frank Kermode summarizes Alain Robbe-Grillet’s experimental novel, In the Labyrinth , in his The Sense of an Ending : “the soldier who is the central figure only slowly emerges (in so far as he does emerge) from other things, the objects described with equal objectivity, such as the mysterious packet…
In a contribution to Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law , Leslie Cook helpfully traces the differentiations of Leviticus back to the divisions of creation. In the creation accounts, God is differentiated from human beings and human beings from nature by “body, blood, food, time, and space”…
To be accounted clean, land animals have to “chew the cud.” The Hebrew for “chew” is alah , to bring up or to ascend. That’s quite literal. Animals that chew the cud swallow, and then regurgitate the food back to the mouth to chew. By the time we get to…
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