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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In 1859, Baron George-Eugene Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine, began overhauling Paris. The ultimate result was a masterpiece of urban rationality - straight streets, buildings of the same height, squares, a mappable city. On the way to clarity, though, the city was “rendered illegible,” according to art historian T. J.…
Knight says that modernity has not left the upper/lower, intelligible/sensible dualism of Platonism behind, but only tipped it on its side. The modern “subject” is a variation on the world of ideas, while the inert “object” corresponds to the lesser reality of the sensible world.
A strict distinction between law and gospel is offered as a prophylactic against works-righteousness. If it is admitted that law is gospel in any sense, all is lost. But this view assumes the very same view of law that it contests. A proponent of works righteousness sees the law as…
In his essay “What is Enlightenment?” Kant described humanity’s coming-of-age. Enlightenment makes man’s deliverance from the tutelage of external authorities and the achievement of mature autonomy. Earlier, Descartes had constructed an entire philosophy on the foundation of “clear and distinct ideas.” The Enlightenment billed itself as the end of blindness…
Since at least Kant, Western theology has been hesitant to talk about salvation in terms of payment, debt, restitution. This helps create and reinforce the separation of public and private, of inner and outer: “We have divided the theological confession of sin. We have invented two parallel worlds, one in…
Knight defines “secularity” as “the term for the determination of an elite to be autonomous and to make the polis the servant and expression of their autonomy. Some are then free of external intellectual authority, but they themselves comprise an undeclared intellectual authority over others. The state would then not…
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