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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From the whirlwind, Yahweh reveals His creative power to Job, challenging Job with a repeated “where were you when. . . ?” The focus is on Yahweh’s power to create, but several times He describes His power as the power to set up dates and doors. It was Yahweh who…
Comparative literature is a standard discipline in our universities. Comparative arts is less familiar. Daniel Albright has written a treatise on comparative art in his recent Panaesthetics . Debates about the unity and diversity of art have been common in Western thought. Albright thinks that the question is unanswerable since…
My friend Rich Bledsoe in response to a recent post on sexual ethics: “it has been pointed out in relation to JD Unwin’s work, that the great, revolutionary destructions of traditional sexual morality (in Russia when marriage was virtually banned as bourgeois, and every form of deviance encouraged, and later…
Brad Gregory ( Unintended Reformation , 268-9) observes that “like radical Protestants, the magisterial reformers, including Calvin, unambiguously condemned avarice, acquisitive individualism, and any separation of economic behavior from biblical morality or the common good.” The Reformers rejected voluntary poverty, but “their attitudes about the proper human relationship to material…
Wisdom from Yves Congar, as compiled by Brother Emile of Taize in his Faithful to the Future (43): “The problems of the fifth century and the resources of Augustine are not those of the third century and Hippolytus; the problems of the thirteenth century and the resources of Thomas Aquinas…
Revelation 12 opens with a tableau of a laboring cosmic mother threatened by a devouring dragon. During the course of the chapter, the dragon’s prey is snatched from his teeth (v. 5) and the dragon is driven from the sky (vv. 7-12). But as soon as the dragon gets to…
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