Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I was still a high school student the first time I read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but I will never forget the powerful impact the book had on me. Of course, as a second year student, I did not fully digest the book. In spite of subsequent readings, I…
Crises force questions of identity. Identities may remain assumed until some event, or series of events, challenge what may have been taken for granted. The search for identity is an anxious one precisely because it tends to happen in times of upheaval and uncertainty. In his recent book, Orthoxox Anglican…
Peter Leithart recently wrote a fascinating short piece about the Half Shekel Temple Tax as an atonement. Leithart argues three main points. First that the Sanctuary Shekel was heavier, i.e., more valuable than the everyday shekel. Second, he offers some analysis about the order of magnitude of the purchasing power…
There is no denial from the careful reader that 1 Samuel 24 and 26 are telling the same story. Perhaps we should say, virtually the same story. But that the stories are cut from the same cloth is undeniable. What we have over these three chapters—1 Samuel 24-26—is a very…
In his novel That Hideous Strength , C.S. Lewis is able to masterfully illustrate in narrative form so many of his insights about the subversive dangers of Leftist political dogma to Christian civilization. Perceptive essays from Lewis like “The Abolition of Man” and “The Inner Ring” are fleshed out in…
At a very practical level, the Evangelical Church has been injected with counterfeit spiritualities. We are a people looking for a city, whose builder may only be in office for four years. Our temptation to veer to the side of the temporal is striking in our day, especially as the…
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Joshua Appel, pastoral assistant at Trinity Reformed Church, informs me that Aquinas’ argument from motion is not what many (including me) think it is. It is not an argument that God is the first domino in the line; rather, it is an argument that God is the universal magnet, the…
Barth has some excellent things to say about the Filioque (CD 1.1, 477ff): 1) He notes that Greek theologians as late as the 5th century explicitly affirmed the filioque. 2) He argues compellingly that the original form of the creed not only does not exclude the filioque. The procession of…
Calvin intriguingly says that the Spirit is the power of persistence and growth and life in creation: not merely the agent for the formation of things, but for their persistence. Spirit ensures the temporal endurance of the creature. As Barth summarizes, ?Both the existence of things, created for as chaos…
Barth argues that the Third Article of the Creed had to be finished before the church could truly wrestle with the doctrine of grace: ?It is logical that this doctrine [of the Spirit] had to be the last stage in the development of the trinitarian dogma. It had to be…
1 Kings 15-16 are a schoolboy’s nightmare. A king rises, a king reigns, a king sins, a king dies. Then his son rises, his son reigns, his son sins, and his son dies. And so on and on, indistinguishable kings with nearly indistinguishable reigns. Baasha’s dynasty repeats Jeroboam’s. And it’s…
Adherents to some form of the New Perspective on Paul are notorious for saying that the Catholic opponents of the Reformers were significantly different from the Jewish opponents of Paul, and that the issues Paul dealt with were not those of the Protestant Reformation. Reformers, on this view, addressed works…
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