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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Iain Provan offers this comment in his Ecclesiastes commentary: “Modern people tend to view the movement of history, as far as human beings are concerned, as being from primeval swamp to divinity. The beginning was unpromising, but quite against expectation the forces of evolution have propelled us along, to a…
Ecclesiastes 12:1: Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth. Solomon ends Ecclesiastes, as we have seen, emphasizing again the brevity of life. Life is vapor, all is vapor, a vapor of vapors, most vaporous, superlatively vaporous. Solomon makes it clear at the end of the book that…
Ecclesiastes 11:1: Cast your bread on the face of the waters, for you will find it after many days. We saw in this morning’s sermon Solomon’s image of casting bread on the water encourages a reckless faith, a willingness to act in spite of the risks. You don’t know whether…
What kind of guidance should we give our children? We often focus exclusively on all the things that they may not do. That is a perfectly sound approach, especially for younger children. After all, we worship and serve a God whose first words to newborn Israel were “Thou Shalt Not.”…
Francis Bacon offered this wise caution, “The human understanding is no dry light but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called ‘sciences as one would.’ For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes . . . . Numberless…
Some notes on Freud, mainly as background for discussion of Ernest Jones psycho-analytic treatment of Hamlet, largely based on Merold Westphal’s summary in Suspicion & Faith. FREUD AND SCIENCE Freud is an Enlightenment man who subverted the Enlightenment, an advocate of scientism whose theories rendered scientism impossible. He appears not…
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