Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…
Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…
The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…
The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…
This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…
If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…
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John Updike wrote that the ending of Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God “proved unexpected and, as I think about them, beautifully resonant, tragic and theological. That Ezeulu, whom we had seen stand up so invincibly to both Nwaka and Clarke, should be so suddenly vanquished by his own god Ulu…
Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father is often viciously cynical, sometimes sexually explicit, but at times it hits home, hard. Like this: To the father who says in exasperation to his son, “I changed your diapers for you, little snot,” Barthleme imagines this response from the son: “This is not the…
INTRODUCTION Jesus teaches that our good works are light in a dark world (Matthew 5:14-16). At the center of the sermon, however, He describes acts of righteousness that are not to be done before men but before God alone. These secret acts are crucial to pursuing a righteousness that surpasses…
Matthew 5:44: But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you in order that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, for He causes His son to shine on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous…
Some more notes from Kierkegaard. 1. In the Problemata sections of Fear and Trembling , Kierkegaard, posing as Johannes de Silentio, poses a series of questions that arise from his reading of the story of Abraham and Isaac, within the Hegelian framework. The questions concern the “teleological suspension of the…
Irenaeus is cited as one of the early proponents of apostolic succession through episcopal ordination. Only bishops who could reconstruct a line back to the apostles could claim apostolic authority: “With the succession of the episcopate they received the assured gift of truth.” Yet, according to K. J. Woollcombe, “in…
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