Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The doctrine of justification is precious among Protestants. And it should be. The fact that God has declared our sins forgiven and that we have a righteous standing in the sight of God united to Christ is comforting and brings great joy. Unfortunately, the biblical teaching on justification is, many…
The Old Testament priests were given a number of seemingly disparate duties. As everyone knows, the priests led the sacrificial worship of Israel; only the priests could sprinkle blood on the altar or within the tabernacle, and only they could approach the altar to turn sacrificial animals into smoke. But…
M issional ecclesiology is all the rage these days, but for many being “missional” means downplaying or even eliminating concern for the “internal” life of the church, particularly its liturgical life. Missional and liturgical, mission and communio , are locked in zero-sum combat. That cannot be right. The liturgy is…
An old friend of mine, now passed into Heaven, started to say this in relationship to his sometimes troubled family, in the last quarter of his life, "I just had to take responsibility for the whole thing..." That was the seed for a new reading of the Gospel for me,…
She departed the port, dressed in her best ceremonial regalia, with tassels and flags fluttering from her mast and rigging. She stood tall, robed in mist, crowned in white, and backlit by the rising sun. There she sat, shimmering and spotless; with a perfect ragtop, and a full tank of…
John the Baptist is presented in the gospels as the fulfillment of the Old Testament promise that God would send His messenger to prepare the way for the coming of the glory of the Lord (Is. 40), and the promise to send Elijah before Him to turn the people to…
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1 John 2:13-14 twice says that groups within the church “know the one from the beginning.” That is a perfectly fine way to translate it, but the Greek has TON AP’ ARXES, “the from the beginning.” To whom is this phrase referring? The more awkward translation suggests the possibility that…
The sequence from 1 John 2:14-15 seems abrupt: John moves from addressing children, fathers, and young men to the warning not to love the world. But there is a link between the “overcoming” in 2:14 to the “world” in 2:15. Every other time the verb “overcome” is used in John,…
The doctrine of original sin is bound up with the conviction that the past inheres in the present, for the human race and for individuals. And for this the denial of original sin is the necessary premise for all revolutionary politics and also explains why revolutionary politics invariably ends up…
Few have said it with the forthrightness of Joseph II, the Habsburg emperor from 1780 to 1790, who justified his 1781 Edict of Toleration because “with freedom of religion, one religion will remain, that of guiding all citizens alike to the welfare of the state. Without this approach we shall…
Since Carl Becker’s book on the heavenly city of the philosophes, historians have recognized that the Enlightenment was motivated, by a secularized version of the biblical story - a fall from the Golden Age of the classical world into the darkness of superstitution and priestcraft, the gospel of Enlightenment and…
Battle lines are never, in reality, as clean as we see them in retrospect. Some 700 of the 20,000 freemasons in pre-Revolutionary France were Catholic clergy, and Michael Burleigh reports that “revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, clergy and laity shared a taste for the same authors. In 1778 Marie Antoinette attended the…
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