Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry. I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you…
CS Lewis's 1948 essay on “Priestesses in the Church” strikes a reader today as simultaneously quaintly naive and trenchantly prescient. The naive part comes near the beginning, where Lewis describes the decision to take “a revolutionary step.” It would “cut ourselves off from the Christian past and to widen the…
Imagine a version of the Lord of the Rings beginning with Sauron riding into the Shire and lopping off heads in a mad search for the ring, driving Frodo to flight from the beginning, helter-skelter and harried. While, no doubt, some Hollywood exec is at this moment scrambling to reboot…
A Communist Confession of Faith states that the aim of the Communists is “to organize society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.” This aim can…
The story of the Fall enjoys a peculiar place in Christian thought. Together with the creation account in the two chapters that precede it, it is one of the few Old Testament narratives consistently to escape the relative neglect the Hebrew Scriptures often suffer. While the characters of Abraham, Moses,…
In the previous essay, we saw that fire is a work of the Holy Spirit. The two are related so closely that they cannot be separated. Now we turn our attention to the Spirit's relationship to water. Many have understood Spirit baptism to be a dry baptism, one that is…
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A while back I posted a quotation that I said was from Tertullian: “You can’t serve God and the Emperor.” The more I’ve read of Tertullian the more suspicious I became about the authenticity of the quotation. I checked with David Ivan Rankin, author of a book on Tertullian and…
Warren Carter (in Horsley, ed., In the Shadow of Empire ) writes, “Not only is the imperial world violent and exploitative, under rulers opposed to and condemned by God, but the Empire is also under the power of the devil and caught up in the continuing struggle between the devil…
University of Illinois history professor Paul Schroeder is worried about the sloppiness involved in calling America an “empire.” America is said to be an empire “simply by being the world’s only superpower, by virtue of its military supremacy, economic power, global influence, technological and scientific prowess, and world-wide alliances. The…
Jon L. Berquist (in Horsley, ed., In the Shadow of Empire ) claims that during the Persian period, Israel devleoped prayer and observance of Sabbath as anti-imperial practices. Daniel’s prayers “resist the law of the king and the rule of the empire.” Sabbath too is anti-imperial: “Sabbath was always construed…
INTRODUCTION Jesus’ lawsuit against the scribes and Pharisees focuses on their failures of leadership (vv. 13-15), their neglect of the important things in the law (vv. 16-24), and their concentration on external show rather than internal purity (vv. 25-28). Of course, these diseases of the soul are not confined to…
Was Jesus condemning the use of all terms of address for religious leaders when He told His disciples not to call anyone Rabbi, Father, or Instructor? Several possible interpretations are absurd on the face of it. Jesus could not have been condemning the use of the specific terms, but leaving…
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