Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For Part 1, click HERE . How did Paul’s earliest commentators view his juxtaposition of music and drunkenness, and did they connect it to the ancient Greek ideas of musical ethos described in Part I? Origen, one of the earliest commentators on Paul, writes about Ephesians 5:18-19: One, however, who…
Perhaps it is because I am a musician that I have always found Ephesians 5:18-19 so arbitrary. But isn’t it a little odd to contrast music and drunkenness? Perhaps it is not obvious that that is what Paul is doing; I know, for myself, that it is remarkably easy to…
In 1 Corinthians 7:12-16 Paul deals with how the Corinthian Christians are supposed to be relating to unbelieving spouses. He essentially tells them, “Look, if your unbelieving spouse is willing to stay with you as a faithful Christian, don’t initiate a divorce. If he/she wants to leave you, let him/her…
For Part 1, click HERE . Those who focus on the supposed “pacifism” of Jesus and condemn the violence of God’s judgments throughout the Old Testament overlook the ministry of sacrificial bloodshed as an alternative to human bloodshed. The sword bearing of the sacrificial system was introduced to avoid the…
How should a Christian respond to the objection that the Bible, like the Koran, is a book of violence and bloodshed? Numerous answers have been offered by well-meaning exegetes, but none of them gets to the heart of the matter: God desires to place a sword in the hands of…
Beginning this summer, Dr. Alastair Roberts will join the Theopolis Institute as an adjunct Senior Fellow, the Institute has announced. Dr. Roberts will be a regular on the Theopolis podcast, teach intensive courses and in the Fellows Program, and help develop new programs and outlets. Roberts earned his PhD from…
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I n Destroyer of the Gods , Larry Hurtado reminds us that “in the Roman era the sexual use of children, including young adolescents and also younger children, was widely tolerated and even celebrated lyrically by some pagan writers of the day, such as Juvenal, Petronius, Horace, Strato, Lucian, and…
“O riginally and properly,” writes John McManners ( Death and the Enlightenment ), the term “dechristianization” refers “to the anti-religious manifestations of the French Revolution,” which were “neither homogenous in character nor unambiguous in meaning.” Dechristianization refers in part to administrative, institutional changes: “The transfer to the secular authorities of…
M ichael Oakeshott ( Hobbes on Civil Association , 38-39) states Hobbes's solution to the dilemma of human violence in evangelical terms. Human existence is plagued by the fear of death, and for Hobbes the only salvation lies in greater fear. The saviour is not a visitor from another world,…
“D uring the first eighty-eight years of [the 20th] century,” writes R. J. Rummel ( Death by Government ) “almost 170 million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other…
J imena Canales has written a history of A Tenth of a Second . It seems an arbitrary cut-off. Why not 1/100 or 1/1000? After all, we've been able to measure in finer units than 1/10 of a second: “In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge famously photographed running horses galloping in a…
W hen the Reformation and humanism are discussed together, the question is typically how the latter helped produce the former. Erika Rummel ( The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany ) turns the question around: How did the Reformation change humanism? One effect was in education: Protestant school orders, drawn…
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