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Curiosity might kill the cat, but a lack of curiosity can kill the soul. As humans, we are well-wired as God’s image-bearers for learning and passing on knowledge in a way that is unique among all other created beings on earth. God fashioned us to wonder because we were created to glorify a God full […]
Ignoring social and political factors is one of the many pitfalls in the discipline of historical theology. These factors can and often do shape theological debates. Take, for example, the relatively unknown so-called Mendicant Controversy of the thirteenth century. The Franciscan and Dominican Orders arose at the beginning of the thirteenth century. These medieval orders […]
I begin with a personal interlude. When I wanted to learn more about early Christian doctrine several years ago, I thought Jaroslav Pelikan’s celebrated The Christian Tradition was as good a place to start as any. Two-hundred pages in, I began to notice this oddly named fellow, Origen of Alexandria, seemed most frequently quoted and […]
As Romans 8 builds to the crescendo that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:39), Paul inserts a jarring Old Testament quotation: “for your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered” (Ps. 44:22). […]
In Part 1 of this essay, I argued that Christians have an interest in cultivating public sites of theological negotiation and persuasion in precisely those locations where a critical mass of human wondering suggests the need. The free appropriation of orthodoxy (“confession” is always a task in the present-tense) and knowing where maturity is demanded […]
“Whatever is not from faith is sin,” Paul wrote (Rom. 14:23). While speaking about secondary truths in context, implicit in the Protestant project is the conviction that Paul’s statement applies to primary truths as well. The conscience, due to the necessity of making individual judgments, straddles all classes of truth. And the wisdom of Paul […]
To hear some people talk, you would think that the birth of freedom, democracy, and the modern world started with the Protestant Reformation. In fact, the coincidence of faith and modernity has less to do with Martin Luther than with John Calvin, the reformer who had the audacity to question the rule of bishops and […]
Why do you read? Do you read to learn, grow, and gain new knowledge? Do you read for pleasure, or does that feel like a luxury you can’t afford? Maybe with the call of ministries and theological studies, you feel like Christian nonfiction is the only option. Yet at the same time, you feel exhausted […]
One of my favorite writers in China is Shi Tiesheng. He summarized the human life in precisely three words: “loneliness, misery, and despair”. He says that whoever you are, if you live in this world and dare to think, you will find one thing to be sure—that life is doomed to be lonely. Whatever you […]
“So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, crying out, ‘Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel.’” John 12:13 The crowds had followed him to Jerusalem. Even more crowds had come out to exalt him as king while he entered. […]
“Only a life of prayer and meditation will render a vessel ready for the Master’s use” (George Muller). “Prayer is the distinctive mark of the Lord’s powerful servants. All of them, in spite of considerable differences, offer to us this common trait: They are men who pray much and who pray fervently” (Adolphe Monod). For […]
In 1930, amid growing tensions within the church over the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, the great Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen published a short work titled The Virgin Birth of Christ. He sought to defend the biblical account of Christ’s miraculous birth against those who not only questioned its historicity but denied its importance as a “fundamental” […]