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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Douglas Campbell responded briefly to my brief discussion of his critique of “justification” theory. In a fit of joie de guerre , I respond briefly. Campbell rebuts what he considers a “weak” argument in my post, namely, the claim that his decision to set out justification theory systematically and propositionally…
Peter Enns raises many of the standard objections to the Bible in The Bible Tells Me So . . . : Yahweh’s command to slaughter the Canaanites, contradictions in Scripture, historical errors and unscientific claims. His answers are pretty standard too. Christian don’t need to worry about God’s command to…
With a single line, Matt Zoller Seitz captures the quiet power of the Sundance TV series, Rectify , recently renewed for a third season: The show “never shouts when it can whisper.” The show’s principal character is Daniel Holden, recently released from 19 years on death row after the discovery…
Saul is presented to Israel as king by lot (1 Samuel 10). Samuel brings the tribes near, and the tribe of Benjamin is selected; then the Matrite clan within the tribe of Benjamin, and then Saul the son of Kish. We’ve seen this before. After the first, unsuccessful battle of…
Opening Heaven’s Floodgates , edited by Jason Silverman, is a wide-ranging collection of essays about the “Genesis flood narrative, its context, and reception.” The book includes detailed essays on the differing chronologies of the flood narrative in various ancient versions; comparative studies of Mesopotamian and Iranian myths; the use of…
Dwight Garner isn’t the first to wonder if the Swedish Academy’s commitment to honor “work of an idealistic tendency” has prevented it from rewarding some of the greatest writers of the past century: “Was it lofty Swedish idealism, as some have contended, that in part kept James Joyce, Virginia Woolf,…
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