Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
During one of my AAPC lectures I read a portion of Richard Mitchell’s provocative little book The Underground Grammarian . Here’s the portion I read: The mind is a rudderless wanderer blown here or there by any puff of breeze. If I mention watermelons, you must think of watermelons; if…
This is the donation thank-you essay for January 2008. Our studies in the Psalms go out month by month in response to donations. I’m putting this one up here as an example, and also because the version I actually mailed out contained several egregious arithmetical errors! So, here is the…
Part 1: Introduction The collapse of the Western tradition in the United States, seen in the hostility to Christianity in government and education, and the elimination of “traditional” or “canon” learning from our institutions of middle and higher learning, provides a crisis and an opportunity for serious believers at the…
While “forgiving oneself” is widely accepted in the secular world as a legitimate and needful thing to do, Christians are rightly suspicious. After all, God is the one who forgives. When we sin against other people, we need to seek their forgiveness, not our own. Nevertheless after looking at Vine’s…
This was originally published as HIStory in the column, “A Pastor’s Perspective” in Ligonier Ministrie’s Tabletalk Magazine . I am not sure of the date but it was probably published in 1999 or 2000. Quick! What’s the basic message of the Bible? Summarize it in as few words as possible…
A Brief Explanation of What a Presbytery Is & Why Pastors in Presbyterian Denominations are Members of Them A belief in the primacy of the local congregation of the Church, I think, reflects the gut feeling of most North American Evangelicals. As a result, the form of Church government universally…
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Peter Brown asks this question in the first essay in Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Canto original series) and sensibly, following the lead of RA Markus, tries to let early Christians themselves answer. There isn’t a single answer. Early in the fourth century,…
Milbank often makes this point, but it’s huge: “Likewise the household, the site of productive provision, was not an arena of ‘politics’ and dialectical disputation, but of unquestioned paternal control. The Christian gothic ‘merging’ of oikos and polis , which as Ruskin in particular grasped, opened the question of virtue…
Mediating institutions - those formations and associations that stand between the individual and the state - are essential for freedom, we’re often told. I agree with the aim, but have questions about whether the notion of mediating institutions gets at it. The main objection is that the theory appears to…
The Aaronic blessing promises the “face” and “countenance” of Yahweh, and places the name of God on the people of God (Numbers 6:27). Psalm 44 explains these words of blessing. Yahweh’s hand drove out nations and planted Israel in the land (v. 2) because He shone the “light of [His]…
David Potter confirms Augustine’s claim that the foreign wars of Rome were an extension of a lust for domination and honor: Roman “thinking [about the outside world] involved terms such as gloria , the glory that was won in battle, the ability to compel a foreign people to do something.…
David Stone Potter again: “Homeric archaeology did not begin with Calvert or Schliemann. It was a feature of life in the second and third centuries AD, when ancient monuments were recognized as such and attached to the world of the poems. There is no reason to doubt that the scepter…
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