Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
[This essay was originally published in 1988. Given the situation that our new national socialists are getting the world into, I thought it might be useful to reprint it here. – JBJordan] The Bible has quite a bit to say about gold, silver, and precious stones, and the Bible always…
I wrote this elsewhere and was encouraged to put it here. It is a comment on what a pastor is. Today, this is not very well understood, and God’s people suffer because of it. There are four professions: medicine, education, law, and religion. Each of these, when done at a…
James Jordan recently pointed out in private conversation how appropriate it is, in John’s Gospel, that Nicodemus is present both to ask Jesus about being born again, and to see Jesus re-enter the womb of the mother. Nicodemus rhetorically asks, “How can a man be born when he is old?…
This is a problematic and much discussed passage. I’ve been discussing it in another forum, and have decided to move it here and present some very preliminary observations about it. One large question is this: Who is the speaker here and what is his situation? Traditionally, the speaker is seen…
1. The current issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction includes a good fantasy novella by John C. Wright, who since his conversion has been writing Christianly. This is a fine fantasy with nods to C. S. Lewis and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and probably Gene Wolfe as well.…
“It is an experience of our days that the spoken name of Jesus alone exercises an unforeseen power; and the effort which it cost to speak this name is perhaps connected to some faint apprehension of the power which is inherent within it. Wherever the name of Jesus Christ is…
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Much of 2 Corinthians is Paul’s defense of his apostolic ministry, which is also a defense of the reliability of the gospel he preached at Corinth. One of the things that led some people to doubt Paul’s status as an apostle was his life of suffering. How can God be…
Suicide has been the province of psychiatrists, sociologists, moralists, theologians, and the occasional anthropologist (Durkheim). It has not gotten much attention from students of theater and dramatic performance. The contributors to Suicide as a Dramatic Performance assume that such a perspective can be illuminating - for some, though not all…
Jenson observes that “Israel knew itself as created by God's word, in the exact sense in which we until recently spoke of ‘a gentleman's word.' Yahweh made a promise and kept it, and just so Israel came to be.” Other nations could boast of “a visible and tangible presence of…
Robert Jenson argues in Unbaptized God that debates about justification regularly fail to notice the multivocal character of the word. Everyone knows that we have different views of justification, but we all believe that they are different “forms of teaching within the same locus of theology, that is, they are…
In the second volume of his Systematic Theology , Jenson raises pointed, Edwardsean questions about free will theodicies. Such devices suppose “that God once created and then somehow retreated, so that at least some things that happen within creation, those dependent on creatures' ‘free will,' he merely, as it were,…
Robert Jenson admits in a 2004 essay that in most of his theological writing he tried to do without the claim that Scripture is inspired. Historically, inspiration has been used to justify the authority of Scripture, but Jenson doesn't believe that use of inspiration is necessary. It's simply obvious that…
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