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Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Apostle Paul

Jonah’s Pauline Move: Finding Mercy for Gentiles in Texts about Mercy for Israel

Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…

by Josh JensenJanuary 11, 2024
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Family

A House for Me

Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…

by Mandi GerthJanuary 9, 2024
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Charity

On Parrhesia and Gospel Witness

When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…

by Mark BriansJanuary 4, 2024
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Deuteronomy

Misunderstanding Moses

1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…

by Ralph Allan SmithJanuary 3, 2024
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Advent

40 Theses on Christmas

Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…

by Mark BriansDecember 26, 2023
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Genesis

The Twelve Trials of Abraham

Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…

by Donald LinnemeyerDecember 26, 2023

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Theology

Image of God

Gil Baillie, working in a Girardian framework, suggests that the claim that man is made in the image of God means “this creature can only fulfill its destiny by becoming like someone else. So counterinstinctual and counterintuitive is such a thing, that the likelihood of this creature actually fulfilling such…

April 29, 2006
History

Creative destruction

Vitz suggests that postmodern thought has been largely an act of “creative destruction” serving as an “expose, in the best sense of the term.” The result is “a much large intellectual framework within which everyone, including Christians, can function. It provides a much bigger framework than that which existed fifty…

April 29, 2006
History

Modern self

Paul Vitz describes the modern self this way: “The modern self is characterized by such things as freedom and autonomy, by a strong will, and by the presumption that the self is self-created by the will, operating freely in its construction. The self is assumed to be strong, capable, and…

April 29, 2006
Philosophy

Metanarratives

Many Christians find Lyotard’s claim that postmodernity is incredulity toward metanarratives directly contrary to Christian faith, but James KA Smith offers an interpretation of Lyotard’s that is not hostile to Christianity. For Lyotard, he argues, the issue is not so much the scope of the narrative as the claims they…

April 29, 2006
History

Anti-antimedievalism

David Burrell writes, “Modernity was fairly constituted by a quite specific opposition to medieval thought, as we have noted, so could be called ‘post’ or even ‘antimedieval’ . . . this mode of thinking proceeded by avoiding, if not aggressively removing, any reference to creation and the creator/creature relation. It…

April 29, 2006

Cosmic mediation

Philo’s views on the mediation of the logos are summarized in the TDNT article on mediator: “Stretching from the middle of the world to the ends, and back from the extreme edges to the middle . . . [the logos] holds together all the parts of the world . .…

April 29, 2006

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