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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Nicole Ruane offered an intriguing discussion of the red heifer purification law (Num 19) as an “anti-sacrifice” or “inverted sacrifice.” At a number of points, the actions and concerns of Num 19 overlap with those of the sacrificial texts. The heifer is called a HATTAT (purification offering), and the animal…
Naphtali Meshel of the Hebrew University gave an interesting paper on the dietary laws of Lev and Deuteronomy. He noted that Deut 14 divides animals simply into two categories - pure and impure. Impure animals are both ritually defiling (their corpses are) and are prohibited for consumption; pure animals are…
Reformed writer Andrew Sandlin is taking on Jane Austen: “I first saw with Jim West the 1995 theatrical permutation of Sense and Sensibility (starring Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson) at its initial release. I disliked it then and deplore it now. In seeing this movie again on TV yesterday I…
David Tracy gave a long lecture on the “tragic unconscious of the West.” He summarized the tragic vision as including a) necessity; b) intense suffering and c) an active response to suffering that is not necessarily heroic. One of the intriguing points he made was that tragedy’s necessity is often…
David Hart responded to several critiques of his book, The Beauty of the Infinite , in an AAR session this morning. Gerard Loughlin defended Nicholas Lash against Hart’s assaults on his endorsement of a tragic reading of the gospels. Hart responded by saying that he had not misread or misrepresented…
James Jordan suggests that the reason the Son enters the world to take the bride has to do with the structure of the Triune life and with the factor of time. History is about the human race growing from the daughter of God into the bride of God; humanity is…
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