Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry. I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you…
CS Lewis's 1948 essay on “Priestesses in the Church” strikes a reader today as simultaneously quaintly naive and trenchantly prescient. The naive part comes near the beginning, where Lewis describes the decision to take “a revolutionary step.” It would “cut ourselves off from the Christian past and to widen the…
Imagine a version of the Lord of the Rings beginning with Sauron riding into the Shire and lopping off heads in a mad search for the ring, driving Frodo to flight from the beginning, helter-skelter and harried. While, no doubt, some Hollywood exec is at this moment scrambling to reboot…
A Communist Confession of Faith states that the aim of the Communists is “to organize society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.” This aim can…
The story of the Fall enjoys a peculiar place in Christian thought. Together with the creation account in the two chapters that precede it, it is one of the few Old Testament narratives consistently to escape the relative neglect the Hebrew Scriptures often suffer. While the characters of Abraham, Moses,…
In the previous essay, we saw that fire is a work of the Holy Spirit. The two are related so closely that they cannot be separated. Now we turn our attention to the Spirit's relationship to water. Many have understood Spirit baptism to be a dry baptism, one that is…
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I have argued elsewhere that the Omride dynasty is a counterfeit Davidic dynasty, and that in this structure Ahab is a counterfeit Solomon. John Van Seters suggests in a 2000 Presidential address to La societe canadienne des etudes bibliques that Ahab is also a Davidic character, at least in the…
Bruce McCormack?s article on justification, alluded to in an earlier post, is quite good. He rightly points out that ?the term ?justification?Ehas its home in the judicial sphere,?Ebut equally rightly points out that God?s judgments are different from human judgments: ?God?s verdict differs in that it creates the reality it…
Princeton’s Bruce McCormack protests against the “uncritical expansion of the concept of perichoresis today on the past of a good many theologians.” He suggests that the term “is rightly employed in trinitarian discourse for describing that which is dissimilar in the analogy between intra-trinitarian relations among the divine ‘person’ on…
Berkhof has some intriguing comments about the distinction between “active or objective” justification and “passive or subjective” justification. The first refers to the declaration that God makes concerning the sinner, that the demands of the law have been met and the sinner is considered righteous for Christ’s sake. In this…
If ?justify?Eis both a verdict (?this person is righteous?E and the carrying out of a sentence (?this person is delivered from slavery to Sin?E, then clearly justification cannot be based on anything that the righteous person does. Justification is purely by grace. So, the ?deliverdict?Econstruction of justification does not turn…
If ?justify?Eis both a verdict (?this person is righteous?E and the carrying out of a sentence (?this person is delivered from slavery to Sin?E, then clearly justification cannot be based on anything that the righteous person does. Justification is purely by grace. So, the ?deliverdict?Econstruction of justification does not turn…
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