Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…
Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…
When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…
1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…
Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…
Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…
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In his fine recent biography of John Williamson Nevin, DG Hart notes that the Old School Presbyterians failed to express “the mediated character of grace and of the church’s centrality in dispensing the blessings of the gospel” as clearly as Nevin himself. He attributes this failure not to the influence…
Mark Noll makes the following important distinction between the Puritans and later evangelicals: “Although Puritans stood against Catholic and Anglican formalism, salvation for the Puritans was still mediated by institutions - family, church, covenanted society; in evangelicalism (at least in American forms), salvation was in principle unmediated except by the…
In an intriguing book published some years ago, historian David Noble described the origins of modern science among medieval monks and friars who lived in what Noble called “a world without women.” Though the book promoted every trendy academic fad existing in 1992 and was rife with contradictions (women are…
INTRODUCTION All cultures draw lines between who is “inside” and who is “outside,” and between different classes of people within the culture. Cultures lift some people up “high” and consider some people “low.” The gospel confounds the boundaries of all worldly cultures, and redraws the lines between those who are…
Isaiah 25:6-8: And the Lord of hosts will prepare a lavish banquet for all peoples on this mountain; a banquet of wine, choice pieces with marrow, and refined, aged wine. And on this mountain He will swallow up the covering which is over all peoples, even the veil which is…
Unlike our Bibles, which follow the order of the Septuagint, the Hebrew Bible ends with 2 Chronicles. The last word of the Hebrew Bible is the decree of Cyrus to the exiles of Jerusalem: “Let him go up.” The gospel of Matthew likewise ends with a command to “Go.” The…
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