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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In Numbers 10, Yahweh instructs Moses to make two silver trumpets. They have several uses. 1) If both are blow, the people assemble at the door of the tent (v. 3). 2) A single blast is a summons only to the leaders (v. 4). 3) A second blast is an…
Anthony Milton recounts ( Catholic and Reformed ) the debates within the seventeenth-century church of England concerning the status of the Catholic church. It was a tricky question. If Anglican divines were too hard on the Catholic church, they provided ammunition for dissenting groups who suggested that the semi-reformed church…
Brad Gregory argues in his Unintended Reformation that it is a historical prejudice to treat “magisterial” Protestantism, which relied on the support of state power as “normative” Protestantism. Even now, when confessional historiography has given way to new paradigms of Reformation scholarship, most attention is paid to the magisterial Reformers.…
What appears to be Paul’s first recorded statement on justification comes in Acts 13, in a sermon at Pisidian Antioch. He briefly recounts the history of Israel, concluding with the resurrection that the promise of forgiveness and justification. Verse 39 (v. 38 in the Greek text) states that “through Him…
The Princeton Proposal on Christian Unity, published in 2003 as In One Body Through the Cross has some bracing passages on the connection of unity and mission. The authors insist that the common life of the church is not merely a means for mission, but an “essential goal of the…
The Princeton Proposal (40-1) observes a shift in the basis and nature of division from the Reformation to the present. Initially, disputes “took the form of argumentative exegesis of Holy Scripture, in which the great Christian teachers and witnesses of the past were called to give testimony.” As divisions unfolded,…
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