Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Having spent time in a number of different kinds of churches/denominations over the years, it has been my observation that in every group there are those with a healthy catholic attitude toward other Christians and also those with a proud and condescending attitude toward others who call themselves Christians. If…
The BHrethren might be interested in this post I wrote on my personal blog which disagrees with John Gerstner’s understanding on the Church . Amid all the discussion of eschatology and hypercalvinism and how the visible church may properly be called the body of Christ, I completely overlooked how Gerstner’s…
How does one become a true judge? There are two trees in the Garden. One must first eat of the Tree of Life, which is purely a tree of grace, a gift. This is a tree that one has done nothing to deserve, and one must eat perhaps for a…
I just put up that first essay (#29 in a series) because I’d made some math goofs in the version mailed out, and I thought some other people would be interested. If this kind of study does not interest you, that’s fine. The Kingdom is a big place. Also, as…
. . . and the whole thing gets muddled. The words we traditionally use to translate Hebrew terms in the “sacrificial” system are confusing and often convey the wrong ideas. If we are going to understand Leviticus and the old world system of sacrifices and offerings, the first thing we…
I’ll start things off here. This year I’m preaching through the Gospel according to St. Luke. Over the past ten years I’ve preached through the Gospel according to St. Mark, St. John, and St. Matthew (in that order) in our morning services at Providence. It’s been eye-opening for me; and…
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Martinus de Boer ( Galatians , 372) notes that the verb “walk by the Spirit” in Galatians 5:25 isn’t the normal peritateo but stoicheo , which means “stand or move in a row or line” as in a military formation. De Boer notes that “there may be an allusion, whether…
Several times in his The Godly Image , Romanus Cessario observes how Greek patristic writers influence Thomas’s understanding of the satisfaction of Christ. Cessario traces a shift from Thomas’s early Anselmian juridicism to a more personalist understanding of the atonement in his mature work. The difference, he suggests, had to…
The scientific revolution is often characterized as a revolution in method. In place of speculative, deductive metaphysical science came experimental, empirical science. Philip Ball ( Curiosity ) argues that behind this was a revolution in mentality, in the questions that could be asked and investigated: “To the new philosophers, the…
Katha Pollitt thinks that advocates of abortion rights have been cowed into meekness. In Pro , she argues that abortion needs to be reclaimed as a “positive social good,” and “an essential option for women — not just ones in dramatic, terrible, body-and-soul-destroying situations, but all women — and thus…
Julia Kristeva’s vigorous, rambling Teresa, My Love is a very personal reaction to the life and writings of Teresa of Avila. Kristeva, a noted feminist cultural theorist, doesn’t share St. Teresa’s faith. Still, she gets to the heart of Teresa’s mysticism in this quotation: “After the dialogical Socrates, before the…
The desire of the flesh is set against the desire of the Spirit, Paul says, so that the two are in opposition (Galatians 5:17). Where they clash, the combat stymies human choice: “you may not do the things that you wish” (cf. Romans 7). By returning to the “flesh” of…
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