Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Peter Leithart recently wrote on his blog about the verse from Revelation 13, "Who is able to wage war with the beast?" and I could hardly help but take special notice. These were exactly the words l had had echoing about in my own head recently. Of course the answer…
I confess to mixed feelings about Jon Stewart. There’s a great deal about his work that I don’t particularly like. I don’t like his profanity, the worst of which is mercifully bleeped out before it makes it onto the YouTube clips that are my main source of snippets. I certainly…
The Marriage Pledge , authored by Ephraim Radner and Christopher Seitz and unveiled by First Things editor R. R. Reno, argues that the time has come for Christian pastors to rend themselves away from civil marriage. The Pledge argues that the fact that many states are now allowing same sex…
Psalm 28 has an overall rhetorical structure that looks like this: lines 1-16, prayer to Yahweh lines 17-20, talk about the wicked lines 21-27, talk about Yahweh (center of psalm) lines 28-29, talk about the anointed people lines 30-33, prayer to Yahweh As is so often the case, the enemies…
A river arises in Eden, flows through the sanctuary-garden, and waters the world downstream. A spring springs up from beneath the throne of God in the temple, rushes over the threshold, and then out to the land, toward the Sea of Salt, where it empties and turns brackish water sweet.…
On Wednesday evening, November 19, Justin Holcomb, Canon for Vocations in the Episcopal Diocese of South Florida and co-founder of REST (Real Escape from the Sex Trade) was a guest of the Theopolis Institute for a lecture on sex trafficking, given at Covenant Presbyterian Church, Birmingham. Dr. Holcomb's lecture began…
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W hen Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount, He is sitting on a mountain teaching about the law. He is a new Moses; He is Yahweh. To get the full force of the analogy, we should recalled that God reveals more on Sinai than the Ten Word or moral…
Mark Kulansky observes in his Salt: A World History that “Almost no place on earth is without salt. But this was not clear until revealed by modern geology, and so for all of history until the twentieth century, salt was desperately searched for, traded for, and fought over.” Salt’s importance…
When we read of Jesus’ “disciples,” we naturally think of the Twelve. But that’s not nearly as clear as we try to make it. Many Bibles include the heading “the first disciples” for the episode in Matthew 4:18-22, but the text never uses the word. Peter, Andrew, James, and John…
In a classic essay on the “Symbolic Significance of Salt,” Ernst Jones neatly summarizes how the natural properties of salt lend themselves to social and religious uses: “Salt is a pure, white, immaculate and incorruptible substance, apparently irreducible into any further constituent elements, and indispensable to living beings. It has…
H ow, Walter Rauschenbush asked in his Theology for a Social Gospel , does Jesus bear our sins? Unsatisfied with “imputation” as an explanation, he turned to a “social” explanation. Jesus was in solidarity with humanity, and human history is a history of sin. Humanity is bound in a enslaving…
In her contribution to J ustification in a Post-Christian Society (52), Christine Helmer summarizes the work of Birgit Stolt, who has examined Luther’s vocabulary of justification: “Through careful linguistic analysis, Stolt shows Luther’s doctrine of justification is not couched in the sterile dogmatic vocabulary of a cognitive appreciation for the…
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