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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The first “not good” thing in the Bible is Adam’s isolation and aloneness (Genesis 2:18). It’s the one discordant “not good” in a string of “goods” that ends with a “very good.” Later, Jethro tells Moses that spending his day judging the people without any help is “not good” (Exodus…
Isaiah charges that Judah has become a rebellious son, and enumerates the rebellions 65:2-5: 1) They walk in a way that is not good. 2) They follow their own thoughts. 3) They provoke Yahweh to His face. 4) The sacrifice in gardens. 5) They burn incense on bricks. 6) They…
The Washington Post reports on a study that assesses the impact of religious affiliation on job applications. “Researchers Michael Wallace, Bradley R.E. Wright and Allan Hyde of the University of Connecticut sent 3,200 fake applications to 800 jobs within 150 miles of two major Southern cities through a popular employment…
Back in 1952, AHN Green-Armytage wrote this splendid description of the world of critical scholarship: “There is a world - I do not say a world in which all scholars live but one at any rate into which all of them sometimes stray, and which some of them seem permanently…
Adriaan Vlok was minister of law and order in South Africa during the apartheid years. As the New Republic reports, he is making amends in a dramatic way. He recently visited one of his victims, Frank Chikane, a black minister: “He’d written it on the front flyleaf of a Bible.…
Jesus taught His disciples to pray to “our Father,” and that has rightly been given a Christological gloss: Jesus and His disciples address a common Father. But that form of address is not wholly unprecedented. Twice Isaiah refers to a group that addresses Yahweh as “our Father” (63:16; 64:8). The…
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