Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I revisited Athanasius’s On the Incarnation in light of Advent this year. A particular passage struck me with a question that I hadn’t considered before. When addressing Adam’s fall, Athanasius says this: “If then there were only the offense and not the consequence of corruption, repentance would have been fine.…
There is much wisdom for kings in the first letter of Paul to the Church in Corinth. As I am preaching through this letter, this is one of the major themes that stands out. That is the theme of the reign of the Christian as we live in union with…
1 The title should not be a surprise to anyone who believes the Bible to be true. According to the Bible, any and every faith and religion that does not conform to the Gospel of Christ are not only false, but ultimately inspired by false spirits. Though Jeffrey Niehaus is…
Names are weighty things, a fact repeatedly evidenced in the biblical narrative. There are several occasions when the names mothers or fathers chose for their children, and the reasons for which the names were chosen, are given extended attention in the text. Much of Genesis 29 and 30, for instance,…
Growing up, I was crestfallen about any Christmas that fell on Sunday. Christmas on Sunday meant going to church when I’d rather lollygag around the Christmas tree in my pajamas, playing with new toys. Christmas on Sunday was a drag. If I still felt that way, I know what I’d…
Growing up in the church in Southern America, there was an oft-used category for leaders in the church. It was a category which was used to justify a variety of rules and restrictions on church leaders. Leaders were to be “above reproach” and that meant not drinking in public or…
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RG Collingwood has a whale of a time excoriating individualistic conceptions of art.  He recognizes a theological motif behind the post-romantic notion of the isolated artistic genius: “Individualism conceives a man as if he were God, a self-contained and self-sufficient creative power whose only task is to be himself and…
Hegel writes that the Trinity enables Christianity and especially Christian art to attain a concreteness impossible in Judaism and Islam: “When we state . . . of God thathe is simple One, the Supreme Being as such, we have thereby merely given utterance to a lifeless abstraction of the traditional…
PROVERBS 27:12 As we have seen repeatedly in our study of Proverbs, wisdom is a kind of foresight, an ability to foretell the future, an ability to see down the road. The prudent or “crafty” ( arum ) man can see the evil ahead and does what he needs to…
Henri Pirenne, in his Economic and Social History of medieval Europe, describes the regulation of economic life in medieval towns during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Pirenne is admittedly old news, and perhaps more recent studies have corrected some of his claims. The town government had two main aims: “publicity…
Ha-Joon Chang argues in Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism that highly developed economies impose unfair and hypocritical demands on developing economies.  In particular, the nations that control the international trade and monetary agencies require that developing economies open their markets to imports,…
A discussion this morning concerning the economic impact of the gospel got me to thinking about Byzantium.  What kind of economic system did the Eastern Christian empire, with its centralized state and luxurious capital, have? I found some help in Angeliki Laiou and Cecile Morrison’s The Byzantine Economy.  I include some…
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