Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I just finished re-reading G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday . I have in the past had the temerity to say that I believe it to be the best novel of the 20th century. Be that as it may, I still maintain that it is at least one…
And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against and a sword will pierce through your own soul also, that thoughts out of many hearts may be…
I was inspired to write this article after reading John Ahern’s The Case for Shorter Hymnals first published on Theopolis Institute’s website on November 16, 2021. Mr. Ahern and I are writing with different audiences and emphases in mind. I am thankful we both share a mutual desire to see…
If you’ve spent any time in the social-media galaxy of Christian cultural commentators, you have almost definitely run across the Latin phrase Imago Dei . It means image of God . Why they usually say it in Latin, I couldn’t tell you. We saw it in the wake of the…
The Gospel of Matthew—indeed, the New Testament—begins with a list of names, and that list of names is introduced by this heading: “The book of the generations of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Why start like this? Why “the son of David” and “the son…
A blade is raised. A child wails. But the brow under the crown is untroubled. Solomon knows that the raising of the sword will reveal the true parent and the identity of the son. But how did he know this? Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac certainly bears some of the…
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The Lamb’s worthiness to take the book is triple (Revelation 5:9-10). He is worthy because: 1) He was slain 2) He purchased with His blood 3) He made the purchased-ones a kingdom and priests The second and third of these meritorious acts, though, move out into a four. He purchased…
In a subtle discussion of divine repentance, R.W.L. Moberly ( Old Testament Theology , 122-3) offers this complex reading of Jeremiah 18:1-10. Rather than a contradiction, he suggests that it offers a “striking paradox.” The imagery “strongly emphasizes divine power,” yet at the same time “we have a strong statement…
Gordon Lathrop’s The Pastor: A Spirituality is a wise and beautiful book, to be savored slowly. It’s not perfect; it’s marred here and there by a form of lefty Lutheranism. But it’s such a lovely book that it seems almost obscene to review it. I’ll limit myself to quoting a…
A recent addition to Oxford Studies in Historical Theology, Richard Snoddy’s Soteriology of James Ussher offers a detailed study of an important but neglected figure. If he is known at all, Ussher is known today as a chronologist. Snoddy’s is one of several recent works that shows the breadth of…
As legal affairs correspondent for the Nation , David Cole is no apologist for the NSA. But he argues in his Washington Post review of No Place To Hide that Glenn Greenwald undermines a compelling argument by hyperbole and his failure to acknowledge the limits on NSA activity: “Greenwald’s descriptions…
Theodore Jennings doesn’t think that traditional notions of atonement speak to the contemporary world. We are “no longer familiar” with the language of sacrifice, and that is partly because of Christianity itself: “the Letter to the Hebrews is an essay that largely aims at the destruction of the notion of…
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