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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David Aune has argued that the heavenly court scene of Revelation 4-5 “bears such a striking resemblance to the ceremonial of the imperial court and cult that the latter can only be a parody of the former” (5). He proposes this against the main “major competing view” that “the heavenly…
Will Rees says in his TLS review of Judith Butler's Senses of the Subject that the “biggest topic of discussion” has been Butler's writing style, which he characterizes as “torturous.” It's not just the style. In her poststructuralist early work, Butler argues that “gender identities are constructed by the machinations…
The Economist reports on “an immigrant-led surge in London churchgoing. Weekly participation in Christian services in the capital has grown by 16% since 2005. Most devout Londoners (88%) worship outside the ranks of the established church whose spires pierce the skyline; about a third are Pentecostal.” It is the same…
Drawing on the work of CS Peirce, Giovanni Maddalena ( The Philosophy of Gesture ) argues that pragmatism must be understood as more than an anti-Cartesian movement in philosophy. To the critique of Descartes, it adds a critique of Kant. He summarizes Peirce's critique. Kant is a nominalist, which means…
The Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas has a clear surface structure. A first part, two parts of the second part, and a third part. But that obvious structure doesn't tell the whole story. Thomas explains the structure of the treatise at the outset (1, 2): “Because the chief aim of…
In his Climax of Prophecy , Richard Bauckham’s devotes a long, complicated, fascinating chapter to an analysis of the phrase “tribes, tongues, nations, peoples” (and variations) in Revelation. The arrangement of the lists varies, but the variations are not random. They reinforce substantive connections between different parts of the book.…
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