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 Scott offers this rich interpretation of Inferno 19, where Dante comes across a collection of popes and other churchmen stuck upside-down in the rocks of Hell, their feet “licked” with fire: “Instead of turning their desires heavenward, these corrupt churchmen had sold the things of the Holy Spirit (just…
Why is it Virgil who leads Dante through Hell and as far as the top of Mount Purgatory? Well, he’s a poet for one thing, the greatest poet of all by Dante’s reckoning. Plus, for the medievals, he had taken on the role of sage and magus, and was widely…
Why did Naboth refuse to sell his vineyard to Ahab? Ray Dillard pointed to Leviticus 25 for the answer: “Because the land represented the fruit of the nation’s redemption, God commanded that it remain in the hands of the families to whom it was originally allotted. The land had been…
Why did Naboth refuse to sell his vineyard to Ahab? Ray Dillard pointed to Leviticus 25 for the answer: “Because the land represented the fruit of the nation’s redemption, God commanded that it remain in the hands of the families to whom it was originally allotted. The land had been…
INTRODUCTION Ahab?s sin begins in idolatry. But his sin is not a ?private?Esin, nor is it confined to a ?religious?Earea of life. In 1 Kings, as in all the prophets, idolatry always leads to social oppression and injustice. The sin of Ahab foreshadows the later oppressions of Manasseh and other…
Paul’s description of the church as the body of Christ parallels in both its basic conception and in its details the social theory of ancient moralists. Seneca, for instance, wrote, “What if the hands should desire to harm the feet, or the eyes the hands? As all the members of…
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