Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
That there is something wrong with the world is obvious. It does not take much time or brilliance to notice it. Once we get the feeling that we could imagine a better world, we are tempted to fix it or, if we cannot, to escape it. For both the world-fixers…
“Our Father in heaven,” what is man that we should be called your sons and daughters, beloved children of God Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, Yahweh of Hosts, the Ancient of Days. You are not a father preoccupied with work or engrossed in your smartphone; you are a present…
The Son of God took on human flesh and entered into the sin and suffering of our world. His life and teaching and suffering from His conception to His suffering on the cross teaches us a lot about how the good news enters into the world. Recently, I was teaching…
There is an unspoken rule about typology that permeates Evangelical thinking. It goes something like this: “If the New Testament authors don’t use an Old Testament character as a type, we don’t either.” There is a soundness in this reasoning, at least in a preliminary sense. There is no better…
In The world of Silence, Max Picard writes, “There does not seem to be any space left where there could possibly have been anything but noise. We take it for granted much as we take the air itself for granted. Everything begins and ends with noise.” Is it fair to…
God is Not There God is not in the book of Esther. Do a word search and you will get 0 results. Also try Lord, Yahweh, Prayer, Temple, or Sacrifice. Even names with God’s name in them, like Elijah, Jeremiah, or Daniel are missing. The fool says in his heart,…
Showing page 57 of 309
Showing page 5 of 43
Sermon outline for this coming Sunday: A House That Stands, Luke 6:12-49 INTRODUCTION The Pharisees sought to renew Israel by applying principles of holiness and separation in every detail of life, such as table manners and how you spent your time on the Sabbath. Jesus agreed that Torah had to…
Here’s the same problem elsewhere in Barth (again relying on Hunsinger’s treatment): This encounter with God, he argued, was mediated, not immediate, and was given by grace, not by nature. The encounter was objectively mediated by Jesus Christ, and given only by the free decision of God. The condition for…
George Hunsinger describes one of the implications of Barth’s “actualism” in this way: Negatively [actualism] means that we human beings have no ahistorical relationship to God, and that we also have no capacity in and of ourselves to enter into fellowship with God. An ahistorical relationship would be a denial…
Joel Garver of LaSalle provided me with the following quotation from Jorge Luis Borges, a quotation that Joel read in a series of lectures on postmodernism this summer: Borges refers to a ‘certain Chinese encylopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor,…
I work on the assumption that all the attributes of God are Trinitarian, relational attributes. How does this work with an attribute like “holiness,” which, by most definitions, describes God as wholly un-related? The key is to notice that the language of holiness in Scripture describes things and persons claimed…
Why does biology start with the cell and work upwards? Why explain biological phenomena in terms of cell activity, rather than cell activity in terms of the activity of larger systems? No doubt there is experimental evidence to support this approach, but I find it prima facie doubtful. In many…
Showing page 2201 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
