Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Minister: What is the true and right knowledge of God? Child: When we know Him in order that we may honor Him. 1 Recently, a friend confessed to me a serious intellectual issue he was having that was blocking his ability to believe and trust in Christ. We talked about…
We exist to renew the church for the sake of the world. We are scaffolding to help Christians rebuild God’s heavenly city that renews the cities of men. To faithfully carry out this task, we need your help . Theopolis eats, drinks, breathes donations. A trickle of money comes in…
In March of 2022, Uri Brito, Presiding Minister of the CREC, asked Peter Leithart to address the pastors of Athanasius Presbytery. Here is what he said to these good men. Thank you, Pastor Brito. I’m honored to speak to the Athanasius Presbytery this morning. And I want to take the…
Increasingly, I have been made aware of an idea and practice floating around in Reformed circles of the need for heads of household membership in a church, with its sometimes attendant practice of “male-heads-of-household voting.” What follows are my thoughts on the practice. The Nature of Church Membership For an…
What kind of future should we expect before the return of Christ and the general Resurrection and Final Judgment? In Daniel chapters 2 and 7, we have two visions representing future history from the time that Daniel lived. Both visions give us a timeline of four successive empires that are…
In the ninth chapter of Deuteronomy, Moses recalls the journey the Israelites took across the wilderness. He reminds them of all their sins and rebellion and of God’s faithfulness to them despite their sins. When he recounts the time when Aaron led the people in the worshiping of the golden…
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Students of Ancient Near Eastern religions and cultures have typically assumed that the peoples of the ANE operated, like ancient Israelites, with a dichotomy of holy and profane. Beate Pongratz-Leisten doubts this, both for Mesopotamia and for Israel. The notion that this dichotomy is a universal religious structures goes back…
K. van der Toorn has a 1989 article summarizing the purity system of ancient Mesopotamia. He describes purity rules as a form of temple etiquette. What makes something unclean is not that it is immoral but that it is displeasing in a particular setting, in this case displeasing before the…
Rivka and Moshe Ulmer summarize rabbinic teaching about charitable giving in Righteous Giving to the Poor . The book includes an overview of rabbinic literature in general before it gets to its main topic. Rich in quotation, the section on tzedakah examines the theological underpinnings of charity, the this- and…
Lida V. Nedilsky’s Converts to Civil Society is a sociological study of civil society in contemporary Hong Kong. But the use of the religious term “convert” is not accidental. Nedilsky argues that Christian conversion in Hong Kong opens up possibilities for other forms of voluntary association, both religious and non-religious.…
Ole Bjerg ( Making Money ) doesn’t believe the classic “commodity” accounts of the rise of money, found in both Adam Smith and Marx. Both posit an original barter economy that is made more efficient by the introduction of a commodity that is used as a medium of exchange. Bjerg…
Gerd Theissen’s contribution to The Depth of the Human Person sharply challenges mainstream views of Paul’s anthropology. It’s not that Paul’s theory is holistic rather than dualistic. That assumption is based on a faulty understanding of ancient anthropology. A holistic anthropology doesn’t necessarily imply a positive view of the body,…
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