Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Keeping the Law Paul states just as emphatically as James that the doers of the law will be justified (Rom. 2:13; James 2:14ff). But who are these doers of the law? Is Paul speaking hypothetically of a class of sinless people who do not really exist? Or does he have…
I have entitled this super-condensed piece to capture interest, but the fact is it sets forth what I have believed and taught long before I had ever heard of the so-called “new perspective.” For example, one can look at my paper on Ephesians 2.15 , written before I had ever…
N. T. Wright and other “New Perspective on Paul” (NPP) theologians have been criticized and condemned for speaking of justification in various “tenses.” In fact, Wright typically begins discussions of justification with future justification and works his way back to the present. But this is hardly a novelty. While the…
A doctrine of “faith alone” must be explicated and lived out in the light of the larger story of faithfulness, a story that reaches its climax in Jesus, the faithful Messiah. Indeed, the idea of “faith alone,” and even Paul’s use of the OT in service of that idea, makes…
In every city in the United States there are at least a couple of Christian radio stations which broadcast preaching around the clock, seven days a week. Many areas have a Christian television station or two which broadcast worship services several hours a day. Almost any bookstore will have a…
The queston has been discussed: which is prior, faith or repentance? It is an unnecessary question and the insistence that one is prior to the other is futile. There is no priority. The faith that is unto salvation is a penitent faith and the repentance that is unto life is…
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B eginning in 1559, the magistrates of the German city of Wesel, in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, required the citizens to commune together (Jesse Spohnholz, “Multiconfessional Celebration of the Eucharist in Sixteenth-Century Wesel”). The city had been the site of intra-Lutheran struggles, and Calvinist immigrants were moving in. Worried about…
M olly Ball's Atlantic piece on “ America’s empty-church problem ” is a must-read. It provides a penetrating, and sobering analysis of the political shifts that came to the surface in the 2016 Presidential election. Trump's election was not , she argues, the triumph of the religious right or the…
M atthew Bates argues in Salvation by Allegiance Alone that “our contemporary Christian culture often comes prepackaged with functional ideas and operative definitions of belief, faith, works, salvation, heaven, and the gospel that in various ways truncate and distort the full message of the good news about Jesus the Messiah…
A fter summarizing recent work on temple building in the Ancient Near East ( 1 & 2 Chronicles , 227–229), Mark Boda takes note of the differences between the accounts of Solomon's temple building in Kings and Chronicles, with an eye to the question of whether or not the Chronicler…
I n the blink of an eye, globalization has changed from the inevitable future and the panacea for all human ills to a curse word and the source of all American misery. It takes guts to speak up for globalization these days. Brent Waters has guts. He no doubt began…
P aul said that God gives us abundantly more than we can ask or imagine, according to the resurrection power of Jesus in us (Ephesians 3:20). Solomon could have told us as much. When Yahweh appears to Solomon at Gibeon, He offers to give the king whatever he asks (2…
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