Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Optimism is “an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcome.” 1 On the other hand, pessimism is “an inclination to emphasize adverse aspects, conditions, and possibilities or to expect the worst possible outcome.” We can see that optimism and…
If we wish to understand the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we must begin with seeing them as a part of the creational order. Trees, along with plants and seed-bearing things, come to life by the word of God as part of…
“I chant slips and irreversible disasters, wiltings, failures, scars, the little disappointments and the large, blue streaks down a world that wishes it was only suncolors.” Paul J. Pastor from Kintsugi Song I recently lost something very valuable. Something I’d had for years and used every day. But, it wasn’t…
In his eponymous book, Jonah follows an exodus pattern. He travels through the waves and east of the city into the wilderness. On a first reading, it looks like another use of this common literary shape in the Old Testament: salvation through the waters of death and the wilderness of…
“Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” The unknowing master of ceremonies didn’t know how right he was. We see this play out in John’s apocalypse. The end is like the beginning,…
Read in isolation, The Test of Adultery (Num 5:11-31) presents the reader with a seemingly bizarre ritual, conjuring up ideas bordering on the Salem Witch Trials. Beyond this, pressing questions linger—such as, “Why is the woman in particular singled out, while no test is provided for the husband of a…
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Some time ago, John Robbins put my name in a list of theologians influenced by Daniel Fuller and John Piper. (I was in the good company of John Frame, Dick Gaffin, and others, so I was actually honored.) The funny thing was, that I had read almost nothing of either…
It’s intriguing that some of our best historians these days are evangelicals. George Marsden’s biography of Jonathan Edwards is just one more in a string of widely-reviewed and well-reviewed works from Marsden. Mark Noll has made the big time. And Alan Guelzo’s biography of Abraham Lincoln was commended in The…
Eugene Genovese has a typically pungent and pugnacious review of Mark Noll’s America’s God in the current issue of The New Republic . He commends Noll’s scholarship, research, erudition, and calls him one of the best of contemporary American historians. He spends most of the review, however, taking Noll to…
I’ve long thought that open theology, the notion that God does not and cannot know future contingent events, is simply consistent Arminian theology. Richard Muller’s description of Arminius’s view of “middle knowledge” (in God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius ) shows that, while Arminius himself did…
Drudge has a link to an article concerning an all-girl gang in San Francisco that is going about and beating up other women and girls with apparent randomness. Police are astonished at the violence and cruelty of the attacks, some of which have included attacks on small children. Can this…
In a post-war world, you need stealth, finesse, cunning. You need, in short, Odysseus, the man of twists and turns, who is the perfect post-war hero. Odysseus would be great in Special Forces.
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