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Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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American Politics

Voting, Praying, and Purity: Two Different Versions of Civil Religion

Pastor John Piper has written on why he (probably) won’t be voting in this month’s presidential election. Reading his argument, I couldn’t help wondering if voting has a cultic significance to Piper. As much as self-admitted Christian Trump-voters are characterized as cult followers, Never Trump Christians often strike me as…

by Mark HorneOctober 30, 2020
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Literature

Pastor Frankenstein

Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself… –– Victor Frankenstein In Mary Shelley’s classic novel, Victor Frankenstein is a young intellectual with an excessive thirst for glory and worldwide acclaim. Having lost his beloved mother, Frankenstein works to…

by Drew KnowlesOctober 27, 2020
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How to Worship

Against Practical Preaching

“Our daughter is just like a baby hippo,” my wife says to me as I hang my coat up. “After we watched a video of hippos munching whole watermelons, she sat down to her own watermelon lunch. She gobbled them up with those same puffy cheeks and big eyes.” My…

by John HigginsOctober 22, 2020
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Abortion

Evangelicals for Adolf: Christians in Hitler’s Germany

Christian compromise with Nazi Germany’s political leadership is well documented in painful detail. There was resistance, but it was the exception rather than the rule. German Christianity was terribly timid. Leadership lacked spiritual strength because of serious Biblical ignorance and unbelief. But it was not just the leaders. Christians in…

by Ralph Allan SmithOctober 20, 2020
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Abortion

For Whom Should a Christian Vote: Moral Reasoning and the 2020 Election

Can a Christian vote for Donald Trump? That might seem like a surprising question given the widespread evangelical support for the President. Yet for a growing number of evangelicals, to vote for Trump is to endorse his moral repugnancy and further discredit gospel-believing Christians who have sold their birthright for…

by Blake JohnsonOctober 13, 2020
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Hermeneutics

Two Yeshuas and a Fish

Thirty-eight years is a long time to take getting somewhere (Deut. 2:14). You could just ask anyone in the unfaithful generation of people whom God brought to the edge of the Promised Land the first time under Moses—if they were still alive, that is (Num. 14:22-23, 32-35). But there are…

by Eric RobinsonOctober 6, 2020

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Holy Spirit

Near the end of his fifth oration, Gregory flies off into an ecstatic review of the Spirit’s work and titles.  It is in some ways standard pneumatology, but the overwhelming rhetorical flood has never been surpassed. “Christ is born; the Spirit is His Forerunner. He is baptized; the Spirit bears…

November 10, 2009

Contrasted being

Gregory’s fifth oration again: Human nature “has a unity which is only conceivable in thought; and the individuals are parted from one another very far indeed, both by time and by dispositions and by power.  For we are not only compound beings, but also contrasted beings, both with one another…

November 10, 2009

Adam, Eve, Seth

From Gregory’s fifth oration, defending the divinity and consubstantiality of the Spirit: “What was Adam?  A creature of God.  What then was Eve?  A fragment of the creature.  And what was Seth?  The begotten of both.  Does it then seem to you that Creature and Fragment and Begotten are the…

November 10, 2009
Philosophy

Antifoundationalism

In the second of his “theological orations,” Gregory Nazianzen catalogs the impenetrable mysteries of creation: “How is it,” he asks, “that the earth stands solid and unswerving?  On what is it supported?  What is it that props it up, and on what does that rest?” And then: “For indeed reason…

November 10, 2009

Graced nature

Cunningham again, arguing that a creation made by a loving Creator cannot be pure nature: “Traditionally, God’s long-term ‘involvement’ with an care for the world has been emphasized through the theological category of grace .  In creating the world, God wills into existence something radically other-than-God; but the world’s ‘otherness’…

November 10, 2009

Retroactive Causality

In his brilliant, flawed These Three are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Challenges in Contemporary Theology) , David Cunningham notes how the doctrine of the Trinity implies retroactive causality: “At first, we might assume that a father precedes his son, both logically and temporally; but this is an illusion.…

November 10, 2009

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