Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…
Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…
The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…
The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…
This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…
If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…
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Pastor Ralph Smith’s series of essays on Deuteronomy 22-23 continues at the Trinity House web site.
John 12:20-23 seems slightly comical. Some Greeks want to see Jesus, and approach Philip, a Galilean. Philip doesn’t simply tell them where Jesus is, but tells Andrew, who goes to tell Jesus that some Greeks want to see Him. In the end, it’s not at all clear if the Greeks…
Israel was redeemed from Egypt ( padah , Deuteronomy 7:8), and in various ways signified that redemption by redemption of firstborn animals (Exodus 13:13-15; 34:20). Jeremiah too speaks of redemption (15:21) from the hand of the wicked and violent. He hopes for a new exodus, enacted not in the life…
I like Ross Douthat, a lot. But I hate to agree with Nate Cohn’s rebuttal to Douthat’s claim that Bush’s overreach in the Iraq war is “responsible for liberalism’s current political and cultural ascendance.” Douthat implies, Cohn claims, that Americans are still conservative. I’m inclined to think that Cohn is…
Derrrida got started early with his combination of intelligence and obscurity. Emily Eakin notes : “In May of 1951, at the age of twenty, Jacques Derrida took the entrance exams for the prestigious École Normale Supérieure a second time, having failed, as many students do, in his first attempt the…
Contemplating the death of his first wife, Dostoevsky uncovered what he thought was a proof of the afterlife. (The notebook entry is translated in Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time , 407-9.) The first plant of the argument was to notice that human beings are incapable of following…
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