Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I've pastored a very rural church for well over a decade. Our town has about 1,000 people and will never grow until Jesus returns. 38 people attend our worship on Sundays. Here's a quick list of what we’ve done to grow our church, and what I’ve done to survive pastorally.…
Thanks for sharing so honestly about your current crisis of creativity. I totally understand and relate to that; it’s happened many times in my musical life thus far, and I’ve begun to accept it as a normal rhythm of the creative process. I actually went through a serious dry spell…
The Broken Stones of Israel At Sinai, the tablets of the Law of Moses were broken and restored. The Old Testament is a history of “new covenants,” including that promised in Jeremiah and fulfilled in Zechariah. Ultimately, the vertical Oath and the horizontal Sanctions met in the death of Jesus…
Woe to the sinful nation. Woe to those who enlarge their estates and build their portfolios. Woe to the drunks. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil. Woe to the proud who are wise in their own eyes. Woe to Congressmen who pass unjust laws and to…
The interpretation of Romans 7:7-25 is notoriously difficult. Good scholars disagree on many aspects of the passage, but the central interpretative difficulty concerns the identity of the “I.” Is Paul referring to himself? Is Paul referring to himself pre- or post-conversion? Does the “I” refer to Adam? Is the “I”…
You board the Metra train at Arlington Heights station one afternoon, heading to downtown Chicago for some sight-seeing. As the train departs from the station, a man in jeans, a striped t-shirt, and a Kansas City Royals baseball cap enters your train car, and begins asking to see each passenger’s…
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Anselm is sometimes accused of deleting the devil from the story of atonement. His satisfaction theory is said to displace and replace the Christus Victor theology of the church fathers, and in so doing to replace and displace Jesus' conquest of the devil from the center of the atonement. In…
Evangelicals commonly say things like, God would have been perfectly just if He had sent the whole of sinful humanity to hell. Anselm would beg to differ. God created "rational beings" so that "through rejoicing in him, it might be blessedly happy" ( Cur Deus Homo , 315). Man was…
Boso, Anselm's interlocutor in Cur Deus Homo , cites a collection of New Testament texts, and concludes: "Christ endured death under the compulsion of obedience, rather than through the intention of his own free will" (276). Anselm denies that there is any compulsion involved. While he acknowledges that the Father…
Three waves of Gentiles flood Judah in the book of Isaiah. The first threat is from Aram and Israel, from Syria and the Northern kingdom. Assyria is the rising power to the east, and that power is threatening to overrun the nations to the west of Assyria. The kings of…
Should we expect our political leaders to be saints? There's a case for saying No. We might begin by making a distinction between private morality and the use of public authority. The ethical question that's relevant to a political leader is the latter: Is he going to abuse power? What…
In what Rosenstock-Huessy calls "the dead universe" of nature, "time gallops 'like water, flung from cliff to cliff' and is never present" ( In the Cross of Reality , 250). This means that "we get to know time only when we leave external space behind us. When a wall stands…
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