Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Some of the key ways Biblical writers draw attention to important details in their stories are by the use of key words, repetition, and structural devices like chiasms and parallel constructions. The Bible sounds different, even odd, to us sometimes because of the use of these and similar literary conventions.…
It is pretty standard in conservative Christian circles to condemn unbelief for pretensions of “autonomy.” Cornelius Van Til famously (at least among those of us who knows who he is) said that “There is no alternative but that of theonomy and autonomy.” Greg Bahnsen appealed to this quotation by labeling…
Jesus was the greatest teacher who ever taught — the Light of the World, whose pure Truth brought sight to the blind (John 9). Almost no one — even those who speak openly against Him — disputes His reputation as a wise and good teacher of the way of love.…
It is clear that the events in Esther are an integral part of the history of the formation of the Restoration Covenant Era. Amalek attacks. Amalek is spoiled. The spoils are used to build the Temple, in the sense that the crude Temple of Zerubbabel can now be glorified with…
It is not coincidental that John Calvin speaks most strongly in defense of vernacular language just after his defense of singing in church. "From this also it plainly appears that public prayers must be couched not in Greek among the Latins, nor in Latin among the French or English, as…
In A Voyage Around the World , George Anson recounts the effects of scurvy upon an unfortunate man: But a most extraordinary circumstance, and what would be scarcely credible upon any single evidence, is, that the scars of wounds which had been for many years healed, were forced open again…
Showing page 80 of 309
Showing page 8 of 43
1 John 2:13-14 twice says that groups within the church “know the one from the beginning.” That is a perfectly fine way to translate it, but the Greek has TON AP’ ARXES, “the from the beginning.” To whom is this phrase referring? The more awkward translation suggests the possibility that…
The sequence from 1 John 2:14-15 seems abrupt: John moves from addressing children, fathers, and young men to the warning not to love the world. But there is a link between the “overcoming” in 2:14 to the “world” in 2:15. Every other time the verb “overcome” is used in John,…
The doctrine of original sin is bound up with the conviction that the past inheres in the present, for the human race and for individuals. And for this the denial of original sin is the necessary premise for all revolutionary politics and also explains why revolutionary politics invariably ends up…
Few have said it with the forthrightness of Joseph II, the Habsburg emperor from 1780 to 1790, who justified his 1781 Edict of Toleration because “with freedom of religion, one religion will remain, that of guiding all citizens alike to the welfare of the state. Without this approach we shall…
Since Carl Becker’s book on the heavenly city of the philosophes, historians have recognized that the Enlightenment was motivated, by a secularized version of the biblical story - a fall from the Golden Age of the classical world into the darkness of superstitution and priestcraft, the gospel of Enlightenment and…
Battle lines are never, in reality, as clean as we see them in retrospect. Some 700 of the 20,000 freemasons in pre-Revolutionary France were Catholic clergy, and Michael Burleigh reports that “revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, clergy and laity shared a taste for the same authors. In 1778 Marie Antoinette attended the…
Showing page 1779 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
