Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The corona virus hit Western society like a Biblical plague — almost. Biblical plagues were actually much more devastating. Still, as Peter Leithart describes the present situation, it is a judgment from God, because the disease itself together with our political solutions brought about a social situation that fits Deuteronomy’s…
“The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t affect anything, don’t mean anything. What makes anyone think that ‘theology’ is a subject at all?” - Richard Dawkins One cannot be a Christian college president or seminary trustee (your essayist is both) without wondering if Richard Dawkins’s notorious take-down of theology…
Nearly every church that I am aware of has adopted differing practices since the recent virus scare began. Some churches continued to meet during the state lock downs, and other churches left their building empty, meeting online through various video conference technologies. Some churches have gone back to life as…
Fear is an inseparable companion of human life. We are afraid of illness and death, poverty and cataclysms, rejection and betrayal, failure and shame. We are afraid of the unknown, so in a sense we are afraid of the future and life itself. Unless we live in the illusory belief…
In the title above, I put the word “heresies” in quotation marks because I would prefer that the word “heresy” be confined to erroneous beliefs about the Trinity and the Person of Christ, rather than be used broadly to describe any view that might be considered an error. 1 At…
I’ve been trying to work out why I’m feeling existentially disconnected from CoV-19-related fears. I’m taking it seriously, but it’s not registering in any deeply personal way. Partly it’s that my routines are largely undisrupted. But as I reflect on people’s reactions I think there’s more, because a lot of…
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Israel laments over her sins and their consequences (Isaiah 64:5-7). Yahweh is angry because of Israel’s persistence in sin (v. 5), and as a result Israel becomes unclean and withered. Verse 6 uses a series of comparisons (using the particle k- four times) that stress the universality of Israel’s predicament…
John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis 1 promises a lot. It offers what Walton calls a “face-value” and “literal” reading of Genesis 1, but one that sidesteps the problems of attempting to reconcile science and the Bible. For Walton, creationist readings and concordist readings that attempt to correlate Genesis…
Andrea Bieler and Luise Schottroff ( The Eucharist ) speak of “sacramental permeability.” That phrase brings a number of emphases to the fore. For starters it “takes seriously the realities of human bodies as a central part of Eucharistic practice and life.” Once we take the bodies of those who…
Martin Noth claims that historical accounts in the Old Testament arose from cultic contexts and creedal statements. He claims to be tracing the “historicizing” process. Jeffrey Niehaus says that the process is actually the opposite, a “creedalizing” one ( God at Sinai , 77): “Leviticus 23:42-43 tells Israel that at…
Lynn Hunt doesn’t think much of Jonathan Israel’s latest, Revolutionary Ideas . She charges that Israel’s intellectual history lacks nuance and fudges the evidence because he “thinks about philosophy and philosophers in obsessively dichotomous terms.” There are children of light and children of darkness, the former are the radicals, the…
Memory is supposed to encourage and ignite hope. In Isaiah 63, however, the people of Israel remember the old days of Moses and despair: “Where is he?” they ask - the one who brought His people through the sea, put His Spirit in their midst, divided the waters and led…
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