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…
Showing page 44 of 309
Showing page 40 of 43
Why does Christianity seem so implausible to so many people in the modern world? In an interview by Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio concerning Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society , Brad Gregory suggests an answer. One of the reasons that early modern political…
Peter Brown ( Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD , 504-5) summarizes the arguments of some posthumously published lectures of Michel Foucault on pastoral power: “It had deep roots in the ancient Near East and…
Whether it’s what Americans wanted to vote for, what we actually collectively voted for was stasis. George Friedman says this at the Stratfor site this morning: “The national political dynamic has resulted in an extended immobilization of the government. With the House — a body where party discipline is the…
In the Guardian today, Linda Woodhead explores the dilemmas of religious liberty. On the one hand is the “libertarian” approach favored by Americans, under which religious freedom is limited only when “it violates civil law or harms others.” In Europe, the more common approach is “secularist,” a system where “individuals…
I regularly buttonhole students and pastors and colleagues, Ancient-Mariner-like, and try to impress upon them the importance of Peter Leithart’s work for our generation and context. He is an exemplary theologian, a consummate renaissance man who hearkens back to an ancient tradition of theology, before our fabricated disciplinary distinctions and…
Richard Polt gives a lucid explanation of Heidegger’s tortured somewhat explanation of freedom ( Heidegger: An Introduction , 128): “Freedom is not just an ability to do whatever we want. More profoundly, freedom is our release into an open area where we can meet with other beings. A rock is…
Showing page 850 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
