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Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Ephesians

“Be Holy for I am Holy”

Below is an excerpt from Mark Horne’s manuscript from his forthcoming commentary on Ephesians, specifically on Paul’s reference to Christians as “saints” (Ephesians 1:1). “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus.” Paul greets…

by Mark HorneMarch 25, 2025
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Exodus

The Perishable in the Ark of the Covenant

There was nothing in the ark except the two tablets that Moses put there at Horeb, where the LORD made a covenant with the people of Israel, when they came out of Egypt (2 Chronicles 5:10). When Solomon finally brought the ark of the covenant to the finished temple in…

by Jonathan WhiteMarch 18, 2025
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Exodus

The Stages of a Man’s Life and the Second Table of the Law

In As You Like It , Shakespeare famously describes the seven ages of a man’s life. The division of man’s life into stages is not an invention by Shakespeare, nor merely a common medieval artifice, but an expression of the real journey taken in life. Shakespeare seems to divide up…

by Ryan HandermannMarch 13, 2025
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Christology

The Essence of God’s Image

Is there a chief characteristic which best illumines the image of God in Man? What is it exactly that makes Man as a lens through which to see God? Moses thoughtfully and deliberately escorts the reader to the characteristic showcased above all else: humility. Though much ink has been spilled…

by Ben LoveladyMarch 11, 2025
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Liturgy

Two Ways of Being Liturgical: A Baptist Response to the High Church Exodus

Note: This essay is adapted from a talk delivered at the Howell E. Jackson Committee conference on “Foundations of Baptist Education,” held at Union University, Oct. 4-5, 2024. It’s no secret that evangelicals are converting to High Church traditions, a term I will use to refer to Anglo-Catholicism, Roman Catholicism,…

by Ryan SinniMarch 4, 2025
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Icons

Don’t Convert: Icons and Images in the Early Church

In recent years, there has been a flurry of conversions from Protestant Christianity towards Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, at least in part due to their supposed early church heritage relative to Protestantism. In the words of Rod Dreher, a former Methodist who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, “Many evangelicals seek…

by John CarpenterFebruary 25, 2025

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History

Modernity of Postmodernism

Postmodern reading is characterized by a hermeneutics of suspicion, but in this postmodern critics are adopting a stance (sometimes quite consciously) rooted in Marxist and Freudian theory. Butler says, “in concentrating on the notion of hidden contradiction, many postmodernists allied themselves to two highly disputable, and certainly totalizing, 19th-century ideologies.”

August 9, 2006
History

On Getting it wrong

Butler argues that “many postmodern ideas” are “at best confused, and at worst simply untrue.” But he’s pretty sanguine about that: “the essential leading ideas of many cultural epochs are open to the same criticism” - he mentions the Romantic notion of Imagination or the fascination with mesmerism in medical…

August 9, 2006
History

Parochial Postmodernism

Butler points out that postmodernism’s claims that grand narratives are passe is very culturally specific, even parochial, and cannot be sustained as a sociological claim: “allegiances to large-scale, totalizing religious and naturalist beliefs are currently responsible for so much repression, violence, and war . . . . It is obvious…

August 9, 2006
History

Postmodern historiography

After reviewing some of the more radical proposals for a postmodern historiography, Christopher Butler, no friend to postmodernism, makes the sensible suggestion that “Postmodern relativism needn’t mean that anything goes, or that faction and fiction are the same as history. What it does mean is that we should be more…

August 9, 2006

Matthew’s genealogy

In his midrashic/lectionary treatment of Matthew, M. D. Goulder suggests that “The three fourteens are to a Jew who had read Daniel six weeks of generations; and if six, then looking forward to a seventh, to make a week of weeks . . . . This, then, is to be…

August 8, 2006

Matthew’s genealogy

In his midrashic/lectionary treatment of Matthew, M. D. Goulder suggests that “The three fourteens are to a Jew who had read Daniel six weeks of generations; and if six, then looking forward to a seventh, to make a week of weeks . . . . This, then, is to be…

August 8, 2006

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