Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto Me. In 2005, God blessed our family with our third child, our second daughter, whom we named Bethany. As soon as Bethany was born, we knew there was something different about her. Unlike her two older siblings, who were born…
Christian, what is it that we believe? While Creeds like the Nicene and Apostle’s have been fundamental pieces of Christian liturgy and life, the American Church is highly unattached to these classic statements. From this creedal phobia has arisen the popular “No Creed, but Christ” slogan. Such slogan, of course,…
Revisiting William Cavanaugh’s devastating 2009 The Myth of Religious Violence . The myth of Cavanaugh’s title is a well-known one. According to the myth, religion is a distinct sphere of human life and practice from the rest of human social life, a universal impulse in human beings, and is dogmatic,…
19 Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. 20 And when he had so…
An octave is a repetition, a repetition with a difference. It’s not the first note played again , but the first note played at a higher pitch. Octaves have always marked new beginnings. Hebrew boys were circumcised on the eighth day. Firstborn sheep were dedicated to Yahweh on the eighth…
We say Jesus’ resurrection is good news. It wasn’t good news for the disciples on the first Easter. More like perplexing, bewildering news. For others, it wasn’t perplexing, and it certainly wasn’t good. It was plain old bad news. Early in Luke’s gospel, Herod is terrified that Jesus might be…
Showing page 113 of 309
Showing page 42 of 43
Several times, Revelation identifies God triadically, triunely as the one “who is and who was and who comes” (1:4, 8; 4:8). He is the present God, the God who reaches back beyond the origins of all things - the God of whom it could always be said “He is” -…
In the introduction to his recent Prophetic Lament , Soong-Chan Rah summarizes studies that show that “lament is often missing from the narrative of the American church” (21). One study “found that in the Lutheran Book of Worship , the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer , the Catholic Lectionary for…
Ron Highland's The Faithful Creator is “sustained argument with evangelical open theism, liberal process theism and other models of creation and providence that deny that God accomplishes his good will in all things.” All such paradigms, he argues, fail ‘to take God's transcendence seriously enough, thinking that God cannot relate…
Ron Highland argues ( The Faithful Creator ) that discussions of providence and freedom often get off on the wrong foot because of a faulty definition of freedom. “Many recent discussions of freedom give the impression that the Bible speaks directly and often about a freedom of the will given…
The exalted martyrs sing “the song ( ode ) of Moses the slave of God and the song of the Lamb” (Revelation 15:3). That could mean that the martyrs sing the song about or even composed by Moses and the Lamb. It could also mean that they sing a song…
In an address to Congress in 1826, Charleston's Catholic bishop John England declares his allegiance, and the allegiance of his church, to the American polity: “I would not allow to the Pope, or to any bishop of our church, outside the Union, the smallest interference with the humblest vote at…
Showing page 372 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
