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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In her God Needs No Passport (89-90), Peggy Levitt reviews some of the recent discussions of cosmopolitanism - from luminaries like Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen. Levitt discovers one notable absence in all of them: Religion plays almost no role. And that absence is due, she argues, to…
In his 1908 treatise on Passing Protestantism and Coming Catholicism , Newman Smyth posed what he considered the decisive question about Protestantism: “to what extent are the Protestant churches losing control of the forces of life? . . . Is it mastering the controlling forces of life?” (13). His answer…
A strong angel takes up a millstone and tosses it into the sea. Just so, he says, Babylon will be thrown down violently and will never be found (Revelation 18:21). How is a millstone like a city? For starters, a millstone is a piece of earth, a rock that is…
Theology students learn everything except the Bible. They learn historical theology and church history, systematics and dogmatics; they master the linguistic and interpretive tools to study the Bible for themselves. Actual study of the Bible is often minimal. Theopolis Bible courses focus on the Scriptures themselves. Under the guidance of…
In a hundred years it may be more important that you are from New York, Shanghai, New Delhi, Johannesburg, or Amsterdam, than that you are from the United States, China, India, South Africa, or Holland. The city is becoming central in new and unique ways. The great institutions of the…
I'm taking a break from the blog for a couple of weeks. Back in mid-July.
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