Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I revisited Athanasius’s On the Incarnation in light of Advent this year. A particular passage struck me with a question that I hadn’t considered before. When addressing Adam’s fall, Athanasius says this: “If then there were only the offense and not the consequence of corruption, repentance would have been fine.…
There is much wisdom for kings in the first letter of Paul to the Church in Corinth. As I am preaching through this letter, this is one of the major themes that stands out. That is the theme of the reign of the Christian as we live in union with…
1 The title should not be a surprise to anyone who believes the Bible to be true. According to the Bible, any and every faith and religion that does not conform to the Gospel of Christ are not only false, but ultimately inspired by false spirits. Though Jeffrey Niehaus is…
Names are weighty things, a fact repeatedly evidenced in the biblical narrative. There are several occasions when the names mothers or fathers chose for their children, and the reasons for which the names were chosen, are given extended attention in the text. Much of Genesis 29 and 30, for instance,…
Growing up, I was crestfallen about any Christmas that fell on Sunday. Christmas on Sunday meant going to church when I’d rather lollygag around the Christmas tree in my pajamas, playing with new toys. Christmas on Sunday was a drag. If I still felt that way, I know what I’d…
Growing up in the church in Southern America, there was an oft-used category for leaders in the church. It was a category which was used to justify a variety of rules and restrictions on church leaders. Leaders were to be “above reproach” and that meant not drinking in public or…
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Davies and Allison point out in their commentary on Matthew that Mark uses the verb DIAKONEIN in 1:13 to describe the angel’s ministry to Jesus after His temptation. The word connotes “table service,” and they suggest that Jesus, hungered by fasting, feeds on the bread of angels, as Israel had…
Every week, we pray that our Father will not lead us into temptation, and that He will deliver us from evil. This is part of the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray, and the petition is reinforced by the promise of James: “Let no one say when he is…
Jesus’ temptation is a preview of the entire gospel. Jesus, the Son of God, becomes flesh, and enters the wilderness of this world, the wilderness that Israel has become. He assumed all human frailties and undergoes all the tests that Israel and all humanity have endured. He is “tested” or…
Shameless plug follows. Jim Manney of Loyola Press was generous enough to ask permission to reprint my essay, “Why Protestants Can’t Write” to The Best Catholic Writing, 2007 . As if I didn’t have enough troubles. The volume includes essays by real Catholics like Pope Benedict XVI (more Catholic than…
The popular picture of Calvin suggests that he was a theologian of truth, and that he subordinates God’s goodness and beauty fairly radically to His truthfulness. In his recent Notre Dame Press book on Calvin’s theology of Word and Image, Randall Zachman thinks otherwise: “I argue, on the contrary, that…
It is often thought that Hermeticism faded during the Christian Middle Ages, to be revived in the 15th century with Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum . One of the central claims of Florian Ebeling’s The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus (Cornell, 2007) is that this is misleading. There was…
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