Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…
Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…
The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…
In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…
Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…
The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…
Showing page 170 of 309
Showing page 39 of 43
Occasionally, I run into people who have never heard of Ken Myers and his Mars Hill Audio ministry. What a tragedy, I think. In case you happen to be one of the darkened multitude, Myers is one of the best-informed Christian cultural commentators of our time, and his audio magazine…
In a Biblical Horizons lecture, Rich Bledsoe argued that the doctrine of justification by faith was the doctrine that needed to be emphasized in the 16th century to exorcise the medieval world where power was based on condemnation. Because of Luther, everyone could stand up to the condemnation of the…
Baptism unites the baptized to the church, which is the bride of Christ. Brides take the name of their husbands, and thus all who are baptized take on the name of Jesus - they are Christians because “Christ” is their Husband’s name. Only feminists would want the baptized to keep…
Gary Burge points out in his NIV commentary on 1 John that the relative pronoun that begins the letter is neuter, even though the subject (LOGOS) is masculine. Drawing on Raymond Brown, he suggests that the neuter is used because it covers not just the person of Jesus the Word,…
It’s common to reconcile James and Paul on justification by saying something like “Paul’s faith is not the faith that James is talking about, and James’ justification is not the justification Paul is talking about.” That is, James is talking about some kind of demonstration of being in a justified…
Doug Ingram suggests in his 2004 Grove Book study of Ecclesiastes that the book has a peculiarly postmodern emphasis on the ambiguity of the world and human life. Pointing to the proliferation of studies of Ecclesiastes over the past decade and a half, he writes that while modern readers find…
Showing page 1823 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
