Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…
Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…
When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…
1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…
Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…
Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…
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INTRODUCTION Yahweh promises to do a new thing for Judah (Isaiah 42:9; 43:19; 48:6). He brings Israel from Babylon, and reorganizes the geopolitical landscape to make a new relation of Israel and the nations. THE TEXT “Thus says the Lord to His anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have…
From Ephesians 5, John Paul II ( Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body ) draws the conclusion that marriage provides a model for the “sacrament of redemption,” the historical and visible revelation of the mystery that has been hidden from the foundations of the world.…
Albert Borgmann ( Crossing the Postmodern Divide ) writes, somewhat surprisingly, of “postmodernism realism” as an alternative to modernism and hypermodernism. It is only surprising, he argues, because we misconstrue the character of modernism’s toxic triple mix of Bacon, Descartes, and Locke, of domination, method, and individualism. Not postmodernism but…
In his Rhythm of Gods Grace , Arthur Paul Boers (a Mennonite theologian!) gives a brief history of daily prayer. In the fourth century, he notes, “it was normal for most churches to have morning and evening prayer every day. Many participated. Christian leaders expected regular attendance. Ambrose of Milan…
Bonhoeffer ( Ethics ) challenges what he thinks of as the pseudo-Lutheran view of vocation. Vocation is not merely a demand to stay within the already-settled limits of a job, an office, a set of procedures. It is a call from Jesus to follow Jesus. “This call does indeed summon…
Bonhoeffer ( Ethics ) raises the question, What is real? His answer is the Sunday School answer: Jesus. If this is true, then Christian ethics faces no tragic dilemmas. We are not confronted with pressure to tailor our witness or action in the name of Jesus to some given reality…
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