Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
G.K. Chesterton assumes a surprising and memorable perspective from which to view the events of Palm Sunday (Matthew 21:1-11) The Donkey by: G.K. Chesterton When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head…
There is a common biblical principle: you must give back what you steal. In the Bible, restitution is repayment with interest. If you rob someone of their money, you have to pay back double what you stole. A thief must pay back fourfold if he steals a sheep, and if…
Identifying Isaiah’s suffering servant with the promised Messiah is unthinkable for a Jew because it combines the offices of humble priest and victorious king. While it is frustrating that Jews refuse to see the sufferings of Christ in Isaiah 53, the reluctance of Christians to interpret the passage in its…
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Psalm 150:6 (ESV) The command to praise God is pervasive throughout Scripture. In the verse above the Spirit calls all things with breath to praise the Lord. Song is also clearly featured all throughout Scripture and is a featured…
“Gender is a social construct.” That’s shocking to people who have assumed that gender and sex were synonyms but at least since I was in college, in the ‘80s, we were taught that “gender” refers to the forms, the customs, the traditions that our culture teaches us to define what…
In Genesis 49, Jacob prophesies about (blesses and curses?) his twelve sons. The first three of them don’t fare well. Jacob recalls Reuben’s offense of taking his concubine (Genesis 35:22) and the murderous violence of Simeon’s and Levi against the Canaanite inhabitants of the city of Shechem (Genesis 34). He…
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Oliver and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan pithily sum up Tertullian’s argument in De corona militis ( From Irenaeus to Grotius , 24): “By concentrating on the particular issue of whether a Christian should wear the military chaplet on ceremonial occasions, it manages to take for granted the more fundamental case against…
Command, Clement of Alexandria wrote, involved “caution, risk taking, and the union of the two,” and these expressed themselves in words, deeds, or word-deeds. Moses was the great model of command, not only to Israel but to the Greeks ( Stromateis , 1.24). Moses’ night march through the sea guided…
In his wise contribution to the Blackwell Companion to Political Theology , RR Reno concludes that Hauerwas’s theology is “a thoroughgoing Christian liberalism” (314). This isn’t a criticism or a charge of inconsistency. Reno knows that Hauerwas “he rejects the liberal ideal of critical detachment. We can never begin by…
Noah Kristula-Green responds to the politicization of the Lego Movie by, well, trying to score political points: “the film does play lip service to political tropes, but what really makes the film work is that it represents the highest form of capitalist expression: it is a commercial.” The film resists…
Putin is watching Ukraine carefully, writes Julia Ioffe , because he knows that what happens in Kiev could be replicated in Moscow: “Putin and the system he built do sweat the small things because Putin sees dissent as a slippery slope. He knows the cold has never stopped a single…
Jesus promises to make the victors in Philadelphia pillars in His temple, and to inscribe a triple name on them. Fill in the blank: “The name of My God, and the name of the ____________ of My God, which comes down out of heaven from My God, and My new…
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