Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
My first title for this series of posts was “Evangelical Sacramental Ecumenism” – not exactly a clickbait title. But those three words, evangelical, sacramental, and ecumenical, say a lot: The centrality of the gospel; a focus on baptism, bread, and wine; and the quest for visible unity among diverse churches.…
I can imagine someone reading the title of this essay and saying to himself, "I have two questions. First, what in the world is “contextualization”?" Second, even before hearing the answer to the first question, he may wonder, "what does baptism have to do with such an awkward and vague…
Deuteronomy 21:18-21 My colleague Ralph Smith has recently written on this passage, here . I entirely agree with Ralph's thrust, which is typological, that the passage is ultimately aimed at the entire nation of Israel itself as the rebellious son. But what I am thinking is from another perspective, perhaps…
In the previous article in this series, I drew attention to the threefold meaning of the Spirit of God descending as a dove on Jesus at His baptism. On a related note, I also argued that 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 and Titus 3:3-7 were parallel passages that addressed the same issues…
The National Anthem protest is misguided. So too the conservative backlash. The Church’s response has been disappointing. I address each in turn. The greatest triumph of the American Civil Rights Movement was its seizing of the moral high ground in American politics. It did so by insisting only on those…
Peter Leithart’s book, The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism , argues that baptism is parallel to and the fulfillment of the old covenant rite of priestly ordination. But this is not something explicitly stated in the New Testament. Why, then, should we believe it? Leithart shows in…
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On his way to visit a pleasing woman in Timnah, Samson is attacked by a lion (Judges 14). He defeats the lion, tearing it “like a young goat,” and then heads on to visit the lady. Does tearing a lion “like a young goat” mean tearing a lion “easily”? Is…
I summarize and interact with more of Naphtali Meshel’s The “Grammar” of Sacrifice at the Trinity House site , examining his concepts of “jugation” and “hierarchy” in “P.”
“It’s a very big, epic sci-fi movie,” says Larry Kasanoff of Threshold Entertainment. He’s talking about a movie based on Tetris, the game of falling geometric shapes. The movie is going to be much, much more than geometry. We’re going to learn that “‘Tetris’ is the teeny tip of an…
John Gray’s TNR review of Richard Dawkins’s An Appetite for Wonder is the very definition of withering. It should be read in full. As a public service, a few of the juicier quotations: “No two minds could be less alike than those of the great nineteenth-century scientist [i.e., Darwin] and…
The Paradosis Center of John Brown University put on an ecumenical conference on the gospel of John last week. I posted a brief report on the event on the Trinity House site .
The TLS reviewer says that Richard Flannagan aspires to poetry, and fails dismally, in his Man Booker nominated The Narrow Road to the Deep North . “The Narrow Road to the Deep North confuses poetry, the higher register, with the trope of repetition - and it is fatal. . .…
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