Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Paradosis Center at John Brown University in Siloam Spring, Arkansas, put on its first conference last week, it was a remarkable event. It was an ecumenical conference including Orthodox (John Behr, Edith Humphrey, others), Catholic (Rusty Reno, Michael Root, others), and Evangelical (Timothy George, David Lyle Jeffrey). Unusually for…
Naphtali Meshel observes in his new The "Grammar" of Sacrifice that scholars have been talking for decades about the "grammatical" character of ritual and sacrifice in general, but have never actually analyzed a specific ritual or sacrificial system grammatically. Some even talk about a "universal grammar" of sacrifice "even though…
Some Christians are rather breezy about the problem of evil. We shouldn't be. Do I need to remind you of the grisly beheadings that have taken place over the past few weeks? Do I need to remind you of the blood of innocents that’s been spilled in our own country?…
Have you ever been to a wedding where the heavens opened and a voice declared the couple “husband and wife”? Few of us have. Beautiful as they are, most marriages are quite mundane. Yet when Jesus talks about marriage, He describes it as something that God does: “What God has…
Jesus is the last and greatest of the Prophets. He is the Prophet that Moses predicted (Deuteronomy 18). That means He gives the final word, brings the blueprints for the final temple, speaks the final world into existence, and has complete and permanent access to the divine court, where He…
Paul stands against those who are “troubling” or “disturbing” the Galatians churches ( tarasso ; 1:7; also in 5:10). The reference seems to be two great troublers from the Old Testament. First, Achan is described as a “troubler” for the problems he causes in the aftermath of the battle at…
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Gregory of Nyssa writes in his Life of Moses: “one limit of perfection is the fact that it has no limit . . . .Why? Because no good has any limit.” And in his treatise on perfection, he’s more expansive: “one ought not to be distressed when one considers this…
It’s not a new insight with me, but it came home with particular force recently: Paul says in Romans 3:28 that “we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of Torah.” To suppoose the point, he asks two rhetorical questions, the first expecting a negative…
David’s house dies and rises again several times in 1-2 Kings: After Athaliah kills the royal seed, Joash rises from the temple; after Samaria falls, the Lord saves Judah from Assyria through Hezekiah’s prayer; after Nebuchadnezzar takes Judah into exile, Jehoiachin is taken from prison and set at the king’s…
In his recent Simply Christian , NT Wright offers this clever retort to skeptical relativism: “Saying ‘It’s true for you’ sounds fine and tolerant. But it only works because it’s twisting the word ‘true’ to mean, not ‘a true revelation of the way things are in the real world’ but…
According to an AOL report, Greg Boyd has lost 1000 members of his church because he has refused to promote conservative political causes. According to the report, “he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus…
According to an AOL report, Greg Boyd has lost 1000 members of his church because he has refused to promote conservative political causes. According to the report, “he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus…
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