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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Jerrold Seigel suggests that Locke’s self has “three different aspects”: We are selves to others “by virtue of what they know about our mental and moral life”; we are “selves to ourselves, but incompletely so, through the imperfect consciousness we have of our lives and deeds in the here and…
Murphy goes into admiring detail describing Thomas’s theory of interior senses in higher animals. Apart from its purely historical interest and the anticipations of later scientific theories, Thomas’s discussion has philosophical and theological interest in its own right. He claims, for instance, that there are a number of interior senses…
Robert Young claims that the controversy over Darwinism in the 19th century was not so much a religion-v.-science controversy as a duel between competing theodicies. At one level, he argues, “the protagonists in the debate were in fundamental agreement. They were fighting over the best ways of rationalizing the same…
Murphy offers an amusing discussion of the question, Assuming a Cartesian dualism of mind and body, how can the mind cause a physical object like the body to move? If one assumes that physicists are correct that physical energy can be transferred to a physical system, it has to arise…
Murphy makes this interesting comment, which she admits is an oversimplification: “the adoption of a dualist anthropology in the early centuries of the church was largely responsible for changing Christians’ conception of what Christianity is basically all about. I am suggesting that original Christianity is better understood in socio-political terms…
In her Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge, 2006), Nancey Murphy argues for a non-reductionist version of physicalism on the question of the “body-soul” problem: “This is the view that humans are composed of only one ‘part,’ a physical body.” She spends a bit over six pages near the…
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