Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I revisited Athanasius’s On the Incarnation in light of Advent this year. A particular passage struck me with a question that I hadn’t considered before. When addressing Adam’s fall, Athanasius says this: “If then there were only the offense and not the consequence of corruption, repentance would have been fine.…
There is much wisdom for kings in the first letter of Paul to the Church in Corinth. As I am preaching through this letter, this is one of the major themes that stands out. That is the theme of the reign of the Christian as we live in union with…
1 The title should not be a surprise to anyone who believes the Bible to be true. According to the Bible, any and every faith and religion that does not conform to the Gospel of Christ are not only false, but ultimately inspired by false spirits. Though Jeffrey Niehaus is…
Names are weighty things, a fact repeatedly evidenced in the biblical narrative. There are several occasions when the names mothers or fathers chose for their children, and the reasons for which the names were chosen, are given extended attention in the text. Much of Genesis 29 and 30, for instance,…
Growing up, I was crestfallen about any Christmas that fell on Sunday. Christmas on Sunday meant going to church when I’d rather lollygag around the Christmas tree in my pajamas, playing with new toys. Christmas on Sunday was a drag. If I still felt that way, I know what I’d…
Growing up in the church in Southern America, there was an oft-used category for leaders in the church. It was a category which was used to justify a variety of rules and restrictions on church leaders. Leaders were to be “above reproach” and that meant not drinking in public or…
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The “do Muslims and Christians worship the same God?” controversy surges on, reported most recently in the Economist . It's worth revisiting. In an earlier post, I charged that the claim that Muslims and Christians worship the same God (what I will call the “identity theory”) implicitly denies a central…
In an article on Revelation, J. Daryl Charles observes that the Roman Empire “had brought about the ‘solution' - ‘salvation' for the human race - and was thus worthy of popular adoration. Empire-adoration necessitated a personal symbol which the ancient city-state could not generate. In the Imperial cult resided the…
In his packed little book, Theology and the Spaces of Apocalyptic , Cyril O'Regan observes that “there seems to be a binary opposition in the modern world between apocalyptic and the discipline of theology” (15). Heterodox apocalyptic is everywhere, in Milton and Blake and Romanticism, among Hegelians, especially those on…
G. Biguzzi asks whether the city “Babylon” (Revelation 17-18) represents Rome or Jerusalem. The first option was presented early, by Victorinus. He “(i) gives the circumlocution, ‘city of Rome,' as toe equivalent of Babylon: . . . ruina Babylonis, id est civitatis Romanae, (ii) identifies the seven mountains of Rev…
Medieval biblical scholars read Scripture through the lens of the quadriga, fourfold sense of Scripture. Texts had a literal sense, an allegorical or Christological sense, a tropological or moral sense, and an anagogical sense. In his recent study of de Lubac, Between Apocalypse and Eschaton , Joseph Flipper focuses on…
Here's some seasoned advice to young scholars on how to write an introduction. 1. Write the book first. You don't know what the book is about until you finish it, and you can't introduce what you don't know. This may seem backwards, but it is inevitable, because a thing is…
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