Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I revisited Athanasius’s On the Incarnation in light of Advent this year. A particular passage struck me with a question that I hadn’t considered before. When addressing Adam’s fall, Athanasius says this: “If then there were only the offense and not the consequence of corruption, repentance would have been fine.…
There is much wisdom for kings in the first letter of Paul to the Church in Corinth. As I am preaching through this letter, this is one of the major themes that stands out. That is the theme of the reign of the Christian as we live in union with…
1 The title should not be a surprise to anyone who believes the Bible to be true. According to the Bible, any and every faith and religion that does not conform to the Gospel of Christ are not only false, but ultimately inspired by false spirits. Though Jeffrey Niehaus is…
Names are weighty things, a fact repeatedly evidenced in the biblical narrative. There are several occasions when the names mothers or fathers chose for their children, and the reasons for which the names were chosen, are given extended attention in the text. Much of Genesis 29 and 30, for instance,…
Growing up, I was crestfallen about any Christmas that fell on Sunday. Christmas on Sunday meant going to church when I’d rather lollygag around the Christmas tree in my pajamas, playing with new toys. Christmas on Sunday was a drag. If I still felt that way, I know what I’d…
Growing up in the church in Southern America, there was an oft-used category for leaders in the church. It was a category which was used to justify a variety of rules and restrictions on church leaders. Leaders were to be “above reproach” and that meant not drinking in public or…
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In Dialectic of Enlightenment , Horkheimer and Adorno characterize the Enlightenment assault on metaphysics as an assault on the remnants of old superstition. Among the Greeks, “by means of the Platonic ideas, even the patriarchal gods of Olympus were absorbed in the philosophical logos . The Enlightenment, however, recognized the…
In their study of Hobbes and Boyle, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer show that Hobbes’s opposition to Boyle’s air pump was as political as scientific. Hobbes complained about the Catholic system because it introduced a double loyalty to church and state, and he was particularly vicious with the priests who…
Does beauty compel assent? It certainly seems to. Ought it? That’s trickier. If an explanation encompasses the data simply and elegantly and beautifully, does that make it a good explanation? Does that make it true? Are the “transcendentals” truly interchangeable? If the explanation does not compel by its beauty, what…
Can we say that Hosea had Jesus in mind when he wrote “out of Egypt I call My Son”? Does it matter whether he did or not? If not, does this mean we can do anything we like to texts, find in them whatever we care to bring? Historian David…
I read John 1:1, and I hear echoes of Genesis 1:1, and I begin to suspect that John wants to teach that the gospel story is a story of new creation. That conclusion does not rest simply on the phrase “in the beginning,” but that phrase is certainly a pointer…
David Steinmetz finds Benjamin Jowett’s claim that Scripture’s “one meaning” is “the meaning which it had to the mind of the Prophet or Evangelist who first uttered or wrote, to the hearers or readers who first received it” to be “insufficiently historical, He argues (in Ellen Davis and Richard Hays,…
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