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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In an article in Biblica, JG McConville points out that Kings does not offer much hope based on reforming kings. On the contrary, the books shows that the efforts of reforming kings are regularly undermined by their successors. Manasseh is not some strange exception but the norm: “Far from leading…
The word “bed” is used nearly a dozen times in 1-2 Kings, and the uses represent a significant minor motif in these books. The following are some reflections on this motif, in large measure inspired by my students’ work. 1) 1 Kings begins with a report about David’s impotence and…
Conceptual difficulties that arise from attempting to express incarnation in categories drawn from the Greeks. Sarah Coakley points to one such problem in a discussion of the work of Richard Norris on the Chalcedonian settlement. She finds fault with some of Norris historical analysis, charging that he imports post-liberal obsessions…
Conceptual difficulties that arise from attempting to express incarnation in categories drawn from the Greeks. Sarah Coakley points to one such problem in a discussion of the work of Richard Norris on the Chalcedonian settlement. She finds fault with some of Norris historical analysis, charging that he imports post-liberal obsessions…
The question debated among medieval political theorists was not whether Christendom was a body, ultimately the body of Christ, but whether there was room for more than one “head” of the body. As Otto Gierke summarizes,”Mankind constituted a Mystical Body, whereof the Head was Christ. It was just from this…
“The Bible,” writes Avery Cardinal Dulles, “when it seeks to illuminate the nature of the Church, speaks almost entirely through images, most of them . . . evidently metaphorical.” Citing Pope Paul VI, Dulles lists the following images: “the building raised up by Christ, the house of God, the temple…
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