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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Apostle Paul

Jonah’s Pauline Move: Finding Mercy for Gentiles in Texts about Mercy for Israel

Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…

by Josh JensenJanuary 11, 2024
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Family

A House for Me

Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…

by Mandi GerthJanuary 9, 2024
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Charity

On Parrhesia and Gospel Witness

When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…

by Mark BriansJanuary 4, 2024
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Deuteronomy

Misunderstanding Moses

1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…

by Ralph Allan SmithJanuary 3, 2024
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Advent

40 Theses on Christmas

Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…

by Mark BriansDecember 26, 2023
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Genesis

The Twelve Trials of Abraham

Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…

by Donald LinnemeyerDecember 26, 2023

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Luther on baptism and justification

In an article in Bruce McCormack, ed., Justification in Perspective , Carl Trueman makes some helpful comments about the assumptions and consequences of Luther’s views on baptism and justification. “At the heart of Luther’s mature understanding of baptism,” he writes, “as with his mature understanding of justification, is a notion…

April 10, 2007

Easter Sermon

The following is largely inspired by Jon D. Levenson’s Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel . In his novel, The Death of Ivan Illych, Leo Tolstoy tells the story of the life and death of his title character. Ivan Illych is a government lawyer who has devoted his life to…

April 8, 2007

Eucharistic meditation, Easter Sunday

John 21:15: So when they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? He said to him, Yes, Lord; You know that I love You. He said to him, Tend my lambs. Jesus’ breakfast on the beach is a…

April 8, 2007
Uncategorized

Exhortation, Easter Sunday

From beginning to end, from Alpha to Omega, God is a God of life, a God of resurrection. In the beginning, He called into being things that were not. He cried out into the darkness of the first day, so that light dispelled the darkness. He spoke again, and plants…

April 8, 2007

Excerpt from a Funeral Sermon

Resurrection life isn’t only for the future, not only for the end. Because Jesus rose on the third day, and because He poured out His Spirit on us, resurrection life has already begun to spread throughout this world of Sin and Death. Through Jesus and His Spirit, we already live…

April 8, 2007
Literature

Hamlet and the Prayer Book

More from Targoff, discussing Hamlet’s relation to the differing views of worship in the Elizabethan period. Targoff complains that “what is strikingly, and mistakenly, absent from our accounts of the Elizabethan settlement is precisely what the play interrogates in staging Claudius’s prayer: the belief that external practices might not only…

April 7, 2007

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