Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For many people Christmas comes on December 25 and is over December 26. The tree is taken down along with the lights and the other decorations, and everyone begins setting the house in order for the new year. No more Christmas hymns. No more celebrations (well, until New Year’s Eve).…
The Ascension and the Incarnation should not be disconnected in our Christmas thinking or celebrations. As N.T. Wright notes, the ascension is "a central and vital feature without which all sorts of other things start to go demonstrably wrong. . . . where the ascension has been ignored or misunderstood,…
“In the Word was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness.” Thus John describes the incarnation of the Son. He comes as the living and life-giving light of the world. That’s good news. In the beginning, God spoke and light shone…
Christmas is all about Jesus. The angels announce Jesus’ birth, shepherds and wise men come to see Jesus, Herod wants to kill Jesus. We occasionally think of the Father who sent the Son, but we keep returning to the Son made flesh in Bethlehem’s manger. Meanwhile, as always, the Spirit…
Christmas is about many things, but one of the chief things revealed in the gospel of Christmas is the humility of God. We don't often think of humility as an attribute of God. If God is glorious and exalted, we think, He must be haughty and proud and self-centered. We…
John famously begins his Gospel with a piece of theology: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Matthew starts with a genealogy. John celebrates Advent with a hymn, Matthew with a list. For John, Jesus is the Word of creation…
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Why does Christianity seem so implausible to so many people in the modern world? In an interview by Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio concerning Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society , Brad Gregory suggests an answer. One of the reasons that early modern political…
Peter Brown ( Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD , 504-5) summarizes the arguments of some posthumously published lectures of Michel Foucault on pastoral power: “It had deep roots in the ancient Near East and…
Whether it’s what Americans wanted to vote for, what we actually collectively voted for was stasis. George Friedman says this at the Stratfor site this morning: “The national political dynamic has resulted in an extended immobilization of the government. With the House — a body where party discipline is the…
In the Guardian today, Linda Woodhead explores the dilemmas of religious liberty. On the one hand is the “libertarian” approach favored by Americans, under which religious freedom is limited only when “it violates civil law or harms others.” In Europe, the more common approach is “secularist,” a system where “individuals…
I regularly buttonhole students and pastors and colleagues, Ancient-Mariner-like, and try to impress upon them the importance of Peter Leithart’s work for our generation and context. He is an exemplary theologian, a consummate renaissance man who hearkens back to an ancient tradition of theology, before our fabricated disciplinary distinctions and…
Richard Polt gives a lucid explanation of Heidegger’s tortured somewhat explanation of freedom ( Heidegger: An Introduction , 128): “Freedom is not just an ability to do whatever we want. More profoundly, freedom is our release into an open area where we can meet with other beings. A rock is…
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