Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the first post of this series, I proposed that the sacraments of baptism and communion are the nexus point for the evangelical and ecumenical movements. In the following post , I proposed a new orientation for ecumenism – a conciliarity of the cross – with the necessary confession of…
“Contextualization” is now, and has been for a long time, the buzzword for the day. 1 Missionary effort in non-Western countries is all about “contextualization” — making our communication of the Gospel, if not the Gospel itself, fit into the culture to whom we from the West speak. 2 There…
In my previous post , I highlighted the sacraments as the point of convergence between evangelicalism and ecumenism arguing that baptism and communion are presented in the New Testament as signs of the gospel that simultaneously enact and remember union with Christ and the unity of Christ’s body. I concluded…
Click HERE for Part I of this series. What does baptism have to do with culture? As I said in the previous essay, the short answer is “everything!” To begin with, baptism is baptism into Jesus’ death (Romans 6:3). Paul explains this as the crucifixion of the “old man” (“old…
In the accounts of our Lord’s nativity and early childhood, so familiar to us from many years of Advent and Christmas services, we often fail to recognize in them the gentle intimations of a greater nativity that is yet to come. The attentive ear, however, can discover in these passages…
Isaiah warns that Yahweh is coming to remove Judah’s leaders in every area of social, economic and political life so completely that there will be no one left to lead besides children (3:4) and women (v. 12). As Isaiah goes on, however, it becomes clear that the women of Judah…
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Materialism is "good news," according to Stephen Greenblatt, since it shows us the truth of "human insignificance" and dispels enchantment. We're liberated from sacred boundaries to do what we like. Rusty Reno, who quotes this from Greenblatt ( Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society , 148) considers this a…
Paul Gottfried ( After Liberalism ) points out that liberalism doesn’t mean one thing. It “has not been allowed to keep any fixed and specific meaning. It has signified dramatically different and even opposed things at different times and places in the course of this century, from a defense of…
In his Lectures on Godmanhood , Vladimir Solovyev isolated the inner contradiction of 19th-century conceptions of human nature. On the one hand, "contemporary man is aware that he is internally free, deems himself to be higher than any external principle independent of him, asserts himself as the center of everything."…
Many commentators have noted the similarities between Josiah's death (2 Chronicles 35) and that of Ahab (2 Chronicles 18). Christine Mitchell argues, however, that commentators often miss the irony of the Chronicler's account, and some of the other precedents for Josiah's death. One irony has to do with the location…
Robert Heimburger's God and the Illegal Alien is a careful, theologically-informed treatment of American immigration law. He provides detailed overviews of the development of immigration law, including the origins of the concept of a legal "alien," sketches a theology of politics with the help of "Barth's biblical theology of the…
In his monograph on Aliens in Medieval Law , Keechang Kim notes that the distinction of citizen and "alien" replaced the earlier binary of "free" and "unfree" during the later middle ages. He cites John Fortescue's De laudibus legum Anglie (c. 1468-70), which argued that ""Hard and unjust (crudelis), we…
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