Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…
Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…
The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…
The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…
This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…
If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…
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A hab of Israel pops into Chronicles for the first time in 2 Chronicles 18. Readers of Chronicles don't know the background that 1-2 Kings provides—about Ahab's father Omri, about Baal worship and the temple of Baal in Samaria, about Ahab's marriage to Jezebel. Careful readers of Chronicles will notice…
B ack in December, Klay Thompson of the Golden State Warriors scored 60 points in a game. That's a lot. More impressive is the fact that he scored 60 points while playing 29 minutes, for an average of 2.07 points per minute played. The mind-numbing stat, though, is his time…
I n Enneads 5.143, Plotinus reasons: “If the First is perfect, the most perfect of all, and the primal power, it must be the most powerful of all beings and the other powers must imitate it as far as they are able. . . . Fire warms, snow cools, and…
P agans called Zeus “Father,” but, according to Joseph Ratzinger ( The God of Jesus Christ ), “they meant that Zeus was like human fathers—sometimes really nice, when he was in a good mood, but ultimately an egotist, a tyrant, unpredictable, unfathomable, and dangerous. And this was how they experienced…
J oseph Ratzinger ( The God of Jesus Christ ) discerns an underlying commonality between rigorous asceticism and free libertinism. Both express a hatred of the body: “In the false asceticism that is hostile to the creation, the body becomes a dirty bag of maggots that deserves only disdain or,…
T he loss of Aristotelian/Thomist teleological conceptions of reality is often cited as one of the significant shifts in the formation of modernity. It wasn't, however, a secularizing move. As David Hawkes points out ( Idols of the Marketplace ), Bacon saw the notion of a final cause as a…
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