Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
One evening at dusk two men met under a portico near the North wall in Jerusalem. They greeted one another cordially and sat down on a stone bench. They were both Pharisees. One of the men appeared to be uncomfortable and kept looking around nervously. The other said, “Don’t worry,…
John Williamson Nevin’s Controversy With Charles Hodge Over the Imputation of Adam’s Sin (with a Comparison to Robert L. Dabney) If one is blessed to discover George P. Hutchinsons’s monograph on Original Sin in nineteenth-century Reformed thought, 1 no student of American presbyterianism can fail to be fascinated. What once…
If you stop people on the street and ask them, “Where is God?” you’ll get a range of responses from a vague sense that He’s “up there somewhere” to a generic omnipresence (and it goes downhill from there!) What God does in Acts 2 challenges us to develop and apply…
Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as…
John Walton believes that modern Christians have lost multiple worlds: The Lost World of Genesis One; The Lost World of Adam and Eve; The Lost World of Scripture; The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest; The Lost World of the Flood; The Lost World of the Torah. I believe this…
How should the church respond to the pandemic? N.T. Wright has written a book which searches the depths of Scripture to answer this question. Our challenge is that we do not yet understand the pandemic, at least not with any degree of consensus. We don't know whose fault it is,…
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John records Jesus saying “Amen, Amen” some twenty-five times. It’s typically understood as an oath formula, a “double witness” that stresses the truth of what Jesus says. But there’s an additional dimension. The double Amen appears in the Old Testament only a few times. The people respond to Ezra’s blessing…
Jesus has “life in Myself” (John 5:26). That appears to be an inherent quality. But Jesus doesn’t set inherent and received in opposition: The life that He has in Himself is a gift from His Father. His quality of having-life-in-Himself is given to Him from Another. And when He gives…
Why are the seven letters of Revelation addressed to churches in Asia Minor? Asia Minor isn’t a focus of interest at all in the Old Testament, though much of Paul’s ministry is carried out among diaspora communities and churches there. That only shifts the question: Why is Paul interested in…
Derek Thompson analyzes the “savior fallacy” that drives many NBA teams in the Atlantic . It has several components: Mediocrity is the worst, and mediocre teams stay mediocre, so “tanking” becomes a deliberate strategy; one top draft choice can change a loser into a championship team; so, it’s best to…
Robert Kaplan offers a brief in defense of empire at the Atlantic. “Throughout history,” he argues, “governance and relative safety have most often been provided by empires, Western or Eastern. Anarchy reigned in the interregnums.” Globalization today depends on the infrastructure of the British empire: “as the Harvard historian Niall…
Larry Sidentop’s Inventing the Individual is intellectual history of the old school, the broad-sweep, big-idea type. Jeffrey Collins thinks that for all the dangers the book works ( TLS review). It is “a thoroughly interesting and fundamentally convincing book.” The key development, Siedentop argues, was the “Christian revolution” that gave…
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