Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I have never heard anyone say that the Bible is impractical, but I have heard people, after an in depth exegesis of a passage, ask for the practical application. Offer a class on childrearing, marriage, finance and the church members flock to it; offer a course on Leviticus, the visions…
Stones External and Internal The modern practice of dismantling the Bible into a shambles of documents authored in response to disparate historical events rather than viewing it as a unified testimony inspired by God is a surefire way to miss what is actually going on in the text. This failure…
King Asa of Judah made a strong start, purging the land of idols, altars, and images, and winning a war against the ginormous Cushite army led by Zerach. It all unraveled in his final years. From his thirty-fifth year to the forty-first year, when his reign came to an end,…
What appears to be Paul’s first recorded statement on justification comes in Acts 13, in a sermon at Pisidian Antioch. It's can serve as a summary of Paul's letter to the Romans, and throws some important light on the themes of that letter. Paul begins his sermon with a quick…
Iago as Tempter The answer to our first question — whether or not Othello is really great tragedy — has already pointed the way to the answer for the second question — Was Othello a noble Moor or a fool? The two questions, of course, are necessarily related. The fall…
When Adam McIntosh was ordained as Pastor of Saint David’s Church (CREC) in Houston on June 11, 2017, it was the culmination of decades of preparation. Adam is the product of two continents and three Christian traditions. Born in Paducah, Kentucky, he lived his early years partly in Jericho, where…
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David Martin, responding to Shortt’s question about the link between his sociological work and his political theology: “The crux is the necessity of authority, which is a ‘functional pre-requisite’ of social organization, let alone civility, and includes a settled claim to power and the legitimate use of violence. Whatever the…
God’s Advocates , Rupert Shortt’s 2005 collection of interviews with prominent Christian thinkers, is one of the best introductions to contemporary theology available. Premised on the claims that theology is recovering its nerve and that this recovery is especially noticeable in the UK and America, the book includes interviews with…
Christians typically object to deterministic social theories. Humans are not, we insist, slaves to birth, culture, nurture, social status, political affiliation. We are free. That may be the wrong answer. The right answer may be: Yes, outside of Christ, human beings are slaves to all those things and more. These…
Rowan Williams says in an interview with Rupert Shortt, “what caught me and still catches me about Barth is that sense of exuberant bloody-mindedness, enlarged upon at huge length, the gusto, the verve of the theology, with all its outrageous misunderstandings of other people and its wonderfully sanctified egotism.”
FO Matthiessen notes the influence of the metaphysical style “of being ‘totus in illo’” both in individual lines (blubber burning “smells like the left wing of the day of judgment”; Ishmael working on nets imagines it all as “the Loom of Time” and himself as “a shuttle mechanically weaving and…
Melville, simplistically, claimed that the myth of Narcissus was the key to Moby Dick: “still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves…
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