In protest of the new president of the United States, TIME magazine recently resurrected one of their most infamous covers, which instead of asking if God is dead now asks, “Is Truth Dead?” The difficulty of answering that question seems like a modern problem, but even Pilate cynically asked our Lord, “What is truth?” (John […]
There’s no way I can follow my brother in eulogizing my father, so I’m not going to try. I’m not going to speak as a son on the passing of my father. I do want to tell one story about my dad, but before I get to that let me tell you what I want […]
For the past two millennia, the church has wrestled with the questions of how she should best grow in her faith and what exactly it is she’s called to do in the world. People from ascetic hermits to monastic orders to parachurch organizations have attempted to answer these most basic questions concerning the Christian life. […]
As part of his daily prayers, a typical first-century Jewish man began by thanking God for not making him a Gentile, a slave—and finally—for not making him a woman. In a fallen world, we are socially conditioned by messages about who’s important and who’s not, who’s precious and who’s expend-able, who should be in and […]
“RELIGION . . . IS THE OPIATE OF THE PEOPLE.”1 Karl Marx’s well-known maxim illustrates a disturbing reality: Too often religion merely makes people feel better about themselves. Some say that religion is no more than a placebo, a deceptively ineffectual medicine, meant to fool the patient into having hope where no real hope exists. […]
In his Essays, Civil, and Moral, Sir Francis Bacon wrote that the difficulty with lies is not just that truth requires hard work, or that it (truth) inconveniently imposes itself by obliging us to submit to it, but that we love lies themselves. With a glut of information at our fingertips and “credible sources” for […]
While delivering an address at the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology, Richard Lucas, the longtime pastor of St. Helen’s Bishopgate Church in London, England, once said that the phrase “and he also made the stars” at the end of Genesis 1:16 was perhaps the greatest throwaway line in all of Scripture. Having God’s galaxies-creating act […]
According to reports, Prince Charles intends—if he ever ascends the British throne—to change his title from “Defender of the Faith” to “Defender of Faith.” What’s the loss in dropping a definite article? Everything, actually—the traditional title refers to the defense of a particular confession, a body of doctrine concerning the Triune God who has rescued […]
The new Lives of Great Religious Books series from Princeton University Press aims to “recount the complex and fascinating histories of important religious texts”—biographies of books, in other words, not specifically authors. The books featured thus far have been chosen “for general readers,” and the biographies are written by “leading authors and experts.” Notable offerings […]
It should be clear to the average Christian that Protestantism has long been suffering from a wildfire of denominational division. Flames emerge from every argument about whose reading of Scripture is right, and embers still smolder at the question of what a Christian is finally to believe. But what sparked the fire? What fueled the […]
When you hear the phrase “Christian society,” your mind likely turns to Christendom. In his book The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2007), historian Hugh McLeod described Christendom as a place where Christian leaders have close ties to civil authorities, where laws originate from Christian convictions, everyone is assumed to be a […]
Many Western Christians have a problematic understanding of faith. The concept of “faith” has been reduced to a person’s religious beliefs or the mere intellectual assent of an individual to a specific set of religious doctrines or dogmas. This view of faith is not only incomplete when compared to how the Bible speaks of faith, […]
Rupertus Meldenius famously said, “In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” The great strength of evangelicalism has been to unite Christians from diverse theological traditions around the central articles of the creed. But it’s often the case that strength comes with corresponding weakness. There have been recent debates on whether or not […]
