Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Blessing of the Father The narrative of the Exodus makes it clear that Yahweh is Israel’s Father. Moses is told to declare to Pharaoh that “Israel is my firstborn son, and I say to you, ‘Let my son go that he may serve me’” (Exodus 4:22-23). In contrast to…
When reading the Old Testament, the believer faces two dilemmas. First, there is a seemingly sharp discontinuity between the universal proclamation of the gospel to the whole earth and God’s singling out of the nation of Israel. Second, the New Testament says of Jesus that “there is no other name…
John 17 contains the longest prayer that we have from Jesus, and it shows us the intimate relationship between the Father and the Son in a way that few passages do. The prayer lays out the chiastic pattern noted by Athanasius (God became man so that man could become God),…
The following meditation on the incarnation is paraphrased and quoted from Karl Barth, The Doctrine of Reconciliation (Church Dogmatics, Vol. 4, Part 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…
Peter says "baptism saves you" (1 Peter 3:21). Does the New Testament teach that "baptism justifies you"? I think the answer is Yes. That's a controversial answer, and demands some defense and explanation, but first some critical qualifications. No New Testament text states "baptism justifies you," so my argument will…
In his THI article “ Son of David, Son of Abraham ,” Peter Leithart notes that Matthew's genealogy “contains a summary of redemptive history.” This statement is only too true and one that deserves further elucidation. Biblos genese ō s. The first two words of Matthew's Gospel are usually translated…
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R. Taggart Murphy has been writing on Japanese politics, business and economics for a long time, but the rest of the world has lost interest. What fascinates, he says, is Japanese culture - the fashions, the anime, the weirdness of a country where you can pay 7000 yen to be…
Senator Robert Kennedy was shot on June 5, 1968. The next day, Veronica Lueken of Bayside, New York, was praying to St. Therese of Lisieux for Kennedy when she was surrounded by the fragrance of roses. Over the next months, she began writing poetry that she later attributed to St.…
Over at the Trinity House site , I analyze the sevenfold description of Israel’s “good land” in Deuteronomy 8.
In a 2010 article in the Journal for the Society of Christian Ethics , natural law theorist Jean Porter probed the question of same-sex marriage, and concluded that there were no objections in natural law to same-sex sex or to same-sex marriage as such. The article is excerpted here .…
Epistemology has often been viewed as a debate between raitonalists and empiricists. Descartes set certainty as the gold standard of knowledge, and argued from doubt to conclusions that he considered indubitable. Empiricists insist that our senses are capable of giving us reliable knowledge of the world, and in many cases…
Matthew Easter summarizes the back-and-forth of the arguments in the debate over pistis Christou. It’s a careful, judicious summary, and his conclusion seems irrefutable: The debate won’t be resolved by grammar alone, since “interpreters resort either intentionally or unintentionally to their larger models for reading Paul that are already in…
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