Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the first installment of this essay, I offered the following chiastic outline of 1 Timothy: A. 1:1-2. Paul greets Timothy as a true child of the Faith, and blesses with grace, mercy, and peace. B. 1:3-7. Timothy is urged to command against heresy. C. 1:8-11. The reason the Law…
In the first installment of this essay, I offered the following chiastic outline of 1 Timothy: A. 1:1-2. Paul greets Timothy as a true child of the Faith, and blesses with grace, mercy, and peace. B. 1:3-7. Timothy is urged to command against heresy. C. 1:8-11. The reason the Law…
In the Bible, a memorial is something that brings God's promises and previous actions to mind, so that He can do them again. The rainbow is the model, set in heaven so that Yahweh remembers the covenant He makes with Noah (Genesis 9:13-15). God is light and dwells in a…
The First Epistle to Timothy fits neatly in the context of what King Jesus and the church are doing in the gospels, in Acts, Revelation, and all of the Apostolic Age in between. Paul writes to Timothy to encourage him in his work as a pastor in the “latter days,”…
I have been pastoring Cornerstone Reformed Church in Carbondale, Illinois since 1999. We are members of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), but have been practicing catholicity for many years, both personally and corporately. I’ve always believed that the Church of Jesus Christ is much more than the local…
Ecumenism is easy to talk about. It’s doing something to promote it that’s the problem. As a pastor in a town with churches of different denominations, all of whom love their doctrinal distinctions and are jealous to defend them whenever they perceive the slightest challenge, how can you be ecumenical…
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The biographical essays in G. Wright Doyle’s Builders of the Chinese Church summarize the lives of nine key missionary figures in Chinese Christianity. Doyle apologizes early on for including only two Chinese leaders, Liang Fa and Xi Shengmo (Pastor Hsi). He is aware that many other Chinese nationals contributed to…
Writing at the Atlantic , Christopher Orr complains that American political satire collapses easily into the standard American genre, melodrama. He puts the British and American versions of House of Cards in the balance, and the latter comes up wanting: “Tonally . . . the two shows are like night…
The Economist reports that “”The number of Americans giving up their passports has shot up, from less than 1,000 a year in the late 2000s to a record 3,415 in 2014.” One of the main reasons has to do with aggressive efforts to collect taxes from Americans who earn money…
T homas Kidd and Barry Hankins, both of Baylor University, observe that the story of Baptists in America is by most accounts a success story: “Baptists, who command tens of millions of American adherents, including the largest Protestant denomination in America (the Southern Baptist Convention) and the largest African American…
As Mark Stoll pursued research on the history of American environmentalism, he discovered that “A huge proportion of the leaders of environmentalism during its mid-twentieth-century heyday were raised Presbyterian.” As late as the Progressive Era conservationism of 1900-1920, “Progressive conservationists were nearly all raised Presbyterian. The almost complete unanimity astonished…
Revelation 13:16 is the first use of the word “mark” ( charagma ). It is a different word from “seal” in chapter 7 ( sphragis ). The mark of the beast looks like a mark of life and power. Those who refuse to worship the image of the beast are…
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