Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
C. S. Lewis tackled what is perhaps the most difficult and oft-heard objection to the Christian God in his classic, The Problem of Pain. 1 “If God were good,” Lewis restates the problem, “He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be…
There is nothing incongruous about assuming that Jesus lamented over His people on three separate occasions and that on two of those occasions, He expressed Himself in almost identical language. Two lamentations are recorded in the Gospel of Luke and are clearly marked as distinct. They are also expressed in…
In the Anglican Church in North America, the question of women’s ordination to the priesthood continues to be discussed with each diocese left to decide its own practice. A recurring point of debate is how we are to understand the priest’s representative role in the liturgy. Emily McGowin, in a…
The Theopolis Institute recently added two new members to its Board of Directors, Josh Rollins and Sarah Moore. Josh has recently served as Senior Vice President of Corporate Development for MeTEOR Education, and was previously Chief Financial Officer at MeTEOR. He brings a wealth of finance experience, and will take…
Since moving to Englewood, Colorado, I have been blessed to be involved in the nuts-and-bolts practice of Church unity. The pastors here talk about the One Church in Englewood, and mean it. They love each other, pray fervently for each other, and long for the unity they enjoy to spread…
One day, the author Samuel Clemens cut himself shaving. He was an inveterate foul-mouth and on this occasion recited the entirety of his iniquitous vocabulary. When he was finished, his wife, hoping to shock him, repeated every word he said. Clemens responded, "You have the words, dear, but you don't…
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Melanchthon wrote, “The views of Erasmus might have caused greater tumults if Luther had not arisen to arrest them . . . all of this tragedy about the Lord’s Supper started from him.” Melanchthon had in mind Erasmus’s Neo-platonic disparagement of matter, which infected Zwingli and filtered into Anabaptist theology.…
Zechariah predicts that Tyre will be dispossessed and her wealth cast into the sea (v. 4), and then the city will be “consumed with fire.” The verb is the common verb for “eating,” and the picture of an “eating fire” sends the mind back to the sacrificial system, where the…
Zechariah 9:1-4 focuses on the conquest of Tyre, the “wise” city, shrewd at least in amassing wealth (v. 3). But the celebratory description contains a subversive pun. The Hebrew for Tyre is tsor (“rock”), and Zechariah says that Tyre has built herself a fortress, a word built on the same…
In the second edition of African Religions and Philosophy (1989), John Mbiti says that Africans generally lack a concept of the future. Their future tenses reach only a short time into the past, and one people leave the present they are absorbed into an atemporal afterlife. Mbiti notes as well…
E.B. Tylor was the first to characterize African religions as “animist,” remarking that “one great element of religion, that moral element which among the higher nations forms its most vital part, is indeed little represented in the religion of the lower races.” Others characterized the”lower religions” as “fetishist” because of…
Tatian’s Oration to the Greeks is an attempt to vindicate the wisdom of Moses against Greek snobbery toward the barbarians. Aime Puech points out that chronology was central to Tatian’s argument: “In order to rehabilitate the Barbarians it was important to prove that they had contributed their share, indeed the…
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