Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Several months ago, I wrote a First Things essay on the life and ministry of Pastor Tom Clark of Tri-City Covenant Church in Somersworth, New Hampshire. Tom died shortly after that essay appeared, but during his last days we were able to spend a couple of days listening to Tom's…
Scene 1 Mr Faust sitting in a big chair, with Little Faust on his lap, reading. Mrs Faust sitting in another chair, knitting or something. Mr Faust : And I heard him exclaim As he drove out of sight Merry Christmas to all And to all a good night. (Closing…
Sadly, most Christians in the United States, when it comes to recognizing the dangers to their civil and religious liberties, sleep the sleep of ignorance that the disciples slept at Gethsemane before the arrest of Jesus. It ought to be obvious by now how “sexual orientation” laws and “gay marriage”…
From an early period in church history, Christians have confessed belief in a God who created “out of nothing.” God doesn’t need pre-existent matter to work with like a human artisan does; rather, God both calls into existence the material substrate he intends to work with, and he fashions whatever…
January 1 is the start date for a New Year's resolution. December is the month to start making plans for those resolutions. Perhaps the most common resolution Christians make is to read through the Bible in a year. But that resolution runs into a big challenge near the outset: Leviticus.…
BIRMINGHAM, AL – The ECFA (Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability) announced today the accreditation of Theopolis Institute of Birmingham, AL. ECFA accreditation is based on the ECFA Seven Standards of Responsible Stewardship™ , including financial accountability, transparency, sound board governance and ethical fundraising. Theopolis Institute joins a growing number of…
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John’s gospel is a contentious courtroom of a gospel. Legal language dominates the whole gospel - witnesses are called, Jesus promises an advocate, the Jews are constantly trying to put Jesus in the dock. But the whole gospel is really the trial of the Jews, just as what appears to…
Homer’s prologue to the Odyssey delays the identification of the hero until the end of the prologue, a literary sign that this hero comes hidden, disguised, in craft. That, of course, is precisely how Odysseus behaves throughout the epic. John’s gospel begins with similar techniques. We learn about the Word…
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus can be read as dramatizing the Augustinian perspective most recently articulated by Oliver O’Donovan, namely, that “within every political society there occurs, implicitly, an act of worship of divine rule.” Through his dramatization of Roman society, Shakespeare points to another act of worship that constitutes a different sort…
JL Austin famously distinguished between “performative” and “constative” utterances, the former of which perform the action to which they refer and the latter of which make assertions that can be judged as true or false. Modern philosophy has treated the constative as the norm, and performatives, if considered at all,…
How did the linguistic theory of Saussure become a model for anthropologists, sociologists, and analysts of pop culture? Jonathan Culler suggests that this move rests on “two fundamental insights: first, that social and cultural phenomena are not simply material objects or events but objects or events iwth meaning, and hence…
Foucault, in Canguilhem’s summary, argues that an anthropologization of the sciences took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when Kantian philosophy combined with biology, economics, and linguistics to raise the question What is Man? Foucault argues: “From the moment when life, work, and language ceased to be…
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