Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I've pastored a very rural church for well over a decade. Our town has about 1,000 people and will never grow until Jesus returns. 38 people attend our worship on Sundays. Here's a quick list of what we’ve done to grow our church, and what I’ve done to survive pastorally.…
Thanks for sharing so honestly about your current crisis of creativity. I totally understand and relate to that; it’s happened many times in my musical life thus far, and I’ve begun to accept it as a normal rhythm of the creative process. I actually went through a serious dry spell…
The Broken Stones of Israel At Sinai, the tablets of the Law of Moses were broken and restored. The Old Testament is a history of “new covenants,” including that promised in Jeremiah and fulfilled in Zechariah. Ultimately, the vertical Oath and the horizontal Sanctions met in the death of Jesus…
Woe to the sinful nation. Woe to those who enlarge their estates and build their portfolios. Woe to the drunks. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil. Woe to the proud who are wise in their own eyes. Woe to Congressmen who pass unjust laws and to…
The interpretation of Romans 7:7-25 is notoriously difficult. Good scholars disagree on many aspects of the passage, but the central interpretative difficulty concerns the identity of the “I.” Is Paul referring to himself? Is Paul referring to himself pre- or post-conversion? Does the “I” refer to Adam? Is the “I”…
You board the Metra train at Arlington Heights station one afternoon, heading to downtown Chicago for some sight-seeing. As the train departs from the station, a man in jeans, a striped t-shirt, and a Kansas City Royals baseball cap enters your train car, and begins asking to see each passenger’s…
Showing page 108 of 309
Showing page 8 of 43
Love has power to transform the world and lovers. "Love is the answer to the despair in which a reality is lost that knows nothing other than law, fate, and will" (74). Rosenstock-Huessy makes this claim in his Sociology , but he's not being gauzily sentimental. Love takes public form…
What did the fathers who formulated the Nicene Creed mean to assert when they described the relationship between Father and Son with the term homoouios , "same substance"? In what sense "substance" and in what sense "same"? Surveying the usage of this terminology before Nicea, Christopher Stead ( Divine Substance…
Through the administration of the mystery, the manifold wisdom of God is made know through the church to rulers and authorities in the heavenly places (Ephesians 3:9-10). The “mystery” is something hidden in God for ages past and now revealed in Christ. In Ephesians, the mystery is the union of…
Public discourse, it is often argued, has to be conducted in common language, and religious language isn't common. Religion has to be left in the "vestibule." Where does that perception come from? asks Charles Taylor . Taylor traces it to an epistemological distinction: "There is secular reason, which everyone can…
Stephen Holmes ( Quest for the Trinity ) summarizes Gregory of Nyssa's response to Eunomius's use of divine names: "Gregory is scathing about Eunomius's assumption that the divine essence can be adequately named. His arguments on this point are often unsatisfactory, turning regularly on the assumption that the same divine…
Lenn Goodman's essay in Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State presents a devastating critique of Rawlsian political liberalism. The fundamental issue, Goodman claims, is that Rawls treats individual decisions as public acts, and therefore believes that liberalism needs to curtail the influence of ideologies even in the voting…
Showing page 81 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
