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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What about taking “day of wrath” in Romans 2 as AD 70? Some arguments: 1) Dunn lists the verses that use similar phrases for “wrath and indignation” and “tribulation and distress,” and most of them are about historical judgments on Israel. There’s a cluster of uses in Deut 28:55ff, which…
Intellectualism and voluntarism both arise from the same theological error: from the assumption that there is some realm that is independent and autonomous. This is most obvious with intellectualism: For intellectualists, things have indepdendent value that God recognizes and evaluates. Voluntarists are, however, making the same error. They assume that…
Steve Studebaker writers in the Scottish Journal of Theology (56:3) about Edwards’s trinitarian theology, and includes an extended critique of Amy Plantinga Pauw’s treatment of Edwards’s incipient “social trinitarianism.” According to Studebaker, Pauw’s analysis only works if one assumes that the history of Trinitarian theology can be sketched out as…
In the same issue of JSNT, Philip Esler examines ancient oleiculture to illumine Paul’s use of the olive tree image in Romans 11. When he describes branches being grafted into an olive tree, Paul refers to a common practice. But the normal practice is to graft cultivated olive branches onto…
Jerome Neyrey has an interesting article on Acts 20:20 in the current issue of JSNT. He examines the cultural background to Paul’s use of the phrase “in public and from house to house” by examining various expressions in Greek and Latin writers that correspond to modern “public” and “private.” These,…
To what extent is modernity merely a recovery of the tragic? Tragedy, to my knowledge, simply didn’t exist in the medieval world. Drama revived late in the medieval period, but tragedy was reintroduced by the Renaissance. In Shakespeare, the tragic is set in a larger Christian comic setting, with profoundly…
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