Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry. I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you…
CS Lewis's 1948 essay on “Priestesses in the Church” strikes a reader today as simultaneously quaintly naive and trenchantly prescient. The naive part comes near the beginning, where Lewis describes the decision to take “a revolutionary step.” It would “cut ourselves off from the Christian past and to widen the…
Imagine a version of the Lord of the Rings beginning with Sauron riding into the Shire and lopping off heads in a mad search for the ring, driving Frodo to flight from the beginning, helter-skelter and harried. While, no doubt, some Hollywood exec is at this moment scrambling to reboot…
A Communist Confession of Faith states that the aim of the Communists is “to organize society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.” This aim can…
The story of the Fall enjoys a peculiar place in Christian thought. Together with the creation account in the two chapters that precede it, it is one of the few Old Testament narratives consistently to escape the relative neglect the Hebrew Scriptures often suffer. While the characters of Abraham, Moses,…
In the previous essay, we saw that fire is a work of the Holy Spirit. The two are related so closely that they cannot be separated. Now we turn our attention to the Spirit's relationship to water. Many have understood Spirit baptism to be a dry baptism, one that is…
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In his Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Oxford World’s Classics) , Rousseau muses on the “complete and utterly disinterested benevolence” that he would show if he could avoid “forming an attachment to anyone in particular” and “taking on the burden of any responsibilities.” If only he could be entirely anonymous,…
It was Jodocus van Lodenstein, the Dutch reformer, who first coined epigram, ‘Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda est secundum Verbum Dei: the church is reformed and always being reformed according to the Word of God.’ Central to that ongoing reforming work in our day is the recovery of richly Biblical worship.…
INTRODUCTION As He has done before (Isaiah 41:1), Yahweh again summons the peoples to court to present their cases against Him (43:8-9). In the courtroom of history, Israel is a witness in Yahweh’s favor (43:10, 12; 44:8), proving that Yahweh alone is God (43:10). At the center of His defense…
Patrick Coleman notes in his Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment Writer (pp. 9-10) that early Enlightenment writers didn’t necessarily dismiss God. They merely defanged him: “Enlightenment writers were acutely conscious of the ways in which secular as well as ecclesiastical authorities could brandish the image of an angry God to…
Locke ( Two Treatises of Government ) argues that political authority, because it exists only by the consent of free people, cannot exercise power beyond the purposes for which it was constituted. Because it exists for the protection of property, it cannot have power to take property without consent. He…
At the beginning of the first of his Two Treatises of Government , John Locke refutes the Scriptural arguments of Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha ( Filmer: ‘Patriarcha’ and Other Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) ). Filmer claims that political authority is grounded in paternal authority, and characterizes…
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