Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
When Jesus says in the farewell discourse that his disciples know the way to where He is going, Thomas replies: “We do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus answers Thomas, but He gives Thomas more than he asked : “I am the way,…
Through the pandemic we learned a lot about infections, how to catch them, what’s contagious, how to protect yourself from getting the infection. I learned a lot of new terms, like “social distancing,” “ppe” (personal protective equipment), N95 masks, and so on. We’ve seen that people are willing to go…
In Genesis 9:20, Noah is called “a man of the soil”. This phrase is a bit of a shock in the Hebrew; though it’s made up of two very common words - 'ish is “man” and 'adamah is “soil” or “ground” - these two words are never used together before…
Harold Bloom’s discussion of Twelfth Night in his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is, as would be expected, insightful. It displays his deep love of poetry, and includes some truly eloquent descriptions of Orsino: “that sublimely outrageous lover of love” and “amiable erotic lunacy.” Bloom is worth reading just…
There have been times when Evangelicals, in an attempt to be clear about the errors of Rome and Constantinople concerning Mary, have been so denigrating of the mother of our Lord that they sounded more like cut and pasted lines from the Babylonian Talmud than they did disciples of Mary’s…
Awe is the phenomena experienced when one looks up and lights upon the height, majesty, and mystery of the California Redwoods. It appears the trees pierce heaven itself. Among these giant organisms are the Sequoia–while they are shorter in form, they reserve a width that spans an automobile. These trees…
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1 Peter 2:12: Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may on account of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation. As Pastor Sumpter has reminded us today, God visits…
John 20:21-22: So Jesus said to them again, Peace be with you; as the Father has sent Me, I also send you. And when He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit. In Scripture, water is often a boundary.  Israel exited the…
A funny thing happened on the way to mapping the genome, says James Le Fanu ( Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves ).  Humans have 25,000 genes.  That’s enough to get the job done, of course, but scientists were surprised to discover so few.  To transform an…
Athanasius’ treatment of Proverbs 8 is not convincing as exegesis, but as a piece of theology it is brilliant.  When Proverbs says that God “made” and “created” His Wisdom (in the LXX), it doesn’t refer, Athanasius says, to His nature but to His incarnation.  The Son of God is created…
Athansius of course thinks the Arians are wrong because the Son is eternal.  But one of his more intriguing, and satisfying, arguments is based on the biblical notion that the Son is the one through whom the “ages” came into being (Hebrews 1:2). Athanasius says, “every interval in the ages…
Is the church a polis herself?  Or a replacement for the pagan cults at the heart of the ancient polis? There might be another way to say it.  Erik Peterson ( Das Buch von den Engeln , 1935) points to the NT language about a heavenly Jerusalem of which Christians…
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