Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Stories, frankly all human stories are practically always about one thing aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death. . . . “There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that happens to man is ever natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must…
Matthew is organized around 5 discourses, which trace out the history of Jesus as a recapitulation of the history of God and Israel in the Old Testament. Jesus first speaks as a new Moses, instructing His disciples on a mountain about a righteousness that surpasses the righteousness of the scribes…
The fall of the Sethites in Genesis 6 is the third fall of mankind, or the third degree of Adam’s original fall. Adam sinned in a Garden against his Father by stealing something he was supposed to wait to obtain. (“Every tree shall be food for you” Genesis 1:29.) Cain…
The recent fantasy film Noah and a slightly related blog comment by my friend Douglas Wilson have stirred up again the question of whether the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 who married the “daughters of men” were fallen angels or the priestly line of Seth. Doug argues for angels,…
The prophecy of Jude concerns apostasy. An illustration of apostasy and its consequences is found in verse 6, which the New American Standard Bible translates this way: "And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for…
At His death, Jesus is surrounded by a Roman centurion and his cohort of Gentile solders. Matthew doesn't say that any disciples are there. But women are, and so is Joseph of Arimathea, identified as a “disciple” but, as John tells us, a “secret disciple for fear of the Jews,”…
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New Year's Day makes on reflective, at least about the past year, perhaps about life, perhaps, more broadly, about time itself. Many view time as a curse. Some see it as a curse because of missed chances. As one day or year moves on to the next, all we can…
Paraphrased/quoted from Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics , 4.1, pp. 185ff. In the incarnation, the eternal Son of God makes His way into a far country, and takes on the form of a servant. “But the incarnation, the taking of the form of the servant, means not only that God becomes…
GB Caird ( The Revelation of St John the Divine ) has a superb discussion of the harvest scene at the end of Revelation 14. He takes it not as a depiction of horrific judgment but rather as the harvest of the saints in martyrdom. He points out that Jesus…
In his Washington Post piece about the Wheaton College controversy, Miroslav Volf equates Christian positions on Islam to Christian views of Judaism: “Christian theologians neither insisted that they worship a different God than Jews nor did they accuse Jews of idolatry. That’s a step that would have been easy to…
The Economist's Schumpeter reports on the extreme physical disciplines of top American executives - early rising, strenuous exercise, frenetic pace. Then this: “according to one CEO, several of his peers are now dabbling in mind-boosting drugs such as Modafinil and Ritalin, which aid concentration. This trend is likely to intensify:…
According to Hamann, the guilt of the dependent is not in “laziness or cowardice,” as Kant seems to imply. “No, in the blindness of his guardian who pretends to see, and precisely for this reason must assume responsibility for the guilt of all.” Again, “How can one mock the laziness…
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