Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For many people Christmas comes on December 25 and is over December 26. The tree is taken down along with the lights and the other decorations, and everyone begins setting the house in order for the new year. No more Christmas hymns. No more celebrations (well, until New Year’s Eve).…
The Ascension and the Incarnation should not be disconnected in our Christmas thinking or celebrations. As N.T. Wright notes, the ascension is "a central and vital feature without which all sorts of other things start to go demonstrably wrong. . . . where the ascension has been ignored or misunderstood,…
“In the Word was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness.” Thus John describes the incarnation of the Son. He comes as the living and life-giving light of the world. That’s good news. In the beginning, God spoke and light shone…
Christmas is all about Jesus. The angels announce Jesus’ birth, shepherds and wise men come to see Jesus, Herod wants to kill Jesus. We occasionally think of the Father who sent the Son, but we keep returning to the Son made flesh in Bethlehem’s manger. Meanwhile, as always, the Spirit…
Christmas is about many things, but one of the chief things revealed in the gospel of Christmas is the humility of God. We don't often think of humility as an attribute of God. If God is glorious and exalted, we think, He must be haughty and proud and self-centered. We…
John famously begins his Gospel with a piece of theology: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Matthew starts with a genealogy. John celebrates Advent with a hymn, Matthew with a list. For John, Jesus is the Word of creation…
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Barth ( CD 1.2) gives an powerful exposition of the crucial importance of anhypostasis and enhypostasis as Christological concepts. The first refers to the “impersonal” character of the human nature, and the second to the notion that the human nature exists only as the human nature of the Son. Barth…
The Dalai Lama’s comments about sex, inevitably, grabbed the headlines. But I found something else he said at a Lagos press conference the other day more arresting: “Too much attachment towards your children, towards your partner,” is “one of the obstacle or hindrance of peace of mind.” It’s ancient wisdom.…
Charles Barber ( Comfortably Numb ) writes, “In 1916, Dr. Henry Cotton of Trenton State Hospital, believing that germs from tooth decay led to insanity, removed patients’ teeth and other body parts, such as the bowels, which he thought might by the causes of their madness. In so doing, he…
Walker Percy wrote in Lost in the Cosmos (foreseeing the craze for antidepressants): “Assume that you are quite right [to be depressed]. You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth - and who are luckily…
Two fatherless boys - Will, a pious member of the Plymouth Brethren, and Lee, the school’s bully and bad boy - find stability and hope when they become blood brothers and make an amateur Rambo spin-off. It’s a promising premise, but Son of Rambow doesn’t carry it off. The problem…
Barth brilliantly notes the links between Zizendorf, the quest, and the cult of the sacred heart of Jesus. All, he claims, involve a devotion to the human nature of Jesus as such. Zizendorf’s preaching showed “peculiar interest in the creaturely sufferings of Christ.” And “we have here the precursor in…
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