Resources from 2021

Thomas Cole’s The Voyage of Life gives striking artistic expression to what I presume is a fairly common human experience: the maturation process from childhood through to old age. The series consists of four paintings, Childhood, Youth, Manhood, Old Age, each depicting a person of the represented age in a boat, floating down the waterway […]

We end where most of us begin, wondering how the mind of man can become persuaded of the truth that God exists. We implicitly initiated this journey (at the beginning of the series) by clarifying the nature of the term “God” and the nature of the term “existence,” and then we continued to look at […]

There is something special about a mother’s gift, especially her first gift. As is common, a mom often gives her newborn some keepsake gift. She crochets a blanket, buys a cool mobile to go over the crib, or hangs a picture on the wall. Even though the baby is just going to spit up on […]

Resident Assistant training took an unexpected turn when, a week before my junior year of college began, our RA supervisor took out a large bowl, filled it with water, and washed our feet, one at a time. His name was Randy. Your typical football player type, he was handsome and dated an attractive blonde. He […]

Isaiah lived with eyes set on God. This is clear from the opening words of his book: “The vision of Isaiah.” Vision is singular, which tells us that Isaiah is meant to be read as one unified whole. It is not a fragmentary account of Isaiah’s prophecies and life with a few historical narratives thrown in […]

Jerusalem is under attack. Israel, its sister kingdom to the north has already been exiled (722 BC), and now Judah faces the same fate. In 605, the third year of King Jehoiakim (ca. 609-597 BC), the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem and started the first of many deportations to Babylon (Daniel 1:1). Daniel and his […]

There was a blizzard over Thanksgiving weekend this year. The snow fell throughout the day and by nightfall two feet of white covered the ground. Looking out, I saw amid the darkness clean, clear, pure white. The muck was obscured, the dirt invisible. All that I beheld was bright, driven snow; the light shining in […]

In December 1865, the Rev. Philipps Brooks travelled to the land of Israel. As he stood and overlooked the town of Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, Brooks was so moved by what he saw that he penned the words of the celebrated Christmas hymn, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Writing home to his congregation about this […]

What is theology good for? Or, more specifically: what are doctrinal formulations from ecumenical councils like Chalcedon or the Westminster Confession of Faith good for? One answer is that such theology helps us properly interpret unclear passages of Scripture. Protestants have traditionally held that the basics of the Christian faith are so clearly expounded in […]

If Americans recognize the name Eric Voegelin at all, it is for his critique of utopian political visions, encapsulated in the phrase, “don’t let them immanentize the eschaton.” The heady saying was emblazoned on political buttons worn by the Young Americans for Freedom in the 1960s. William Buckley actually coined the phrase after reading Eric […]

“The world is spinning out of control.” “These are unprecedented times.” “I thought things were going to go back to normal.” Behind these common statements often lies an underlying fear and anxiety. Many of us see the chaos and unpredictability in today’s world and dread the future. We wonder, “will we face persecution, an economic […]

Traditionalist Catholic historians routinely tend to argue that Martin Luther’s Reformation ushered in an age of terrifying political absolutism. On this account, the principle of cuius regio, eius religio—“whose realm, their religion”—which emerged out of the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, effectively handed political leaders authority over their subjects’ consciences. In so doing, the principle disrupted […]

Thomas Goodwin (1600-1680) is most often studied for his contribution to congregational ecclesiology as one of the Dissenting Brethren, though Mark Jones has made his Christology a source of interest lately and Joel Beeke often sings his praises. Rarely, if ever, mentioned is Goodwin’s theory of natural law, which is surprising given the close relation […]

In the mid-third century, King Ptolemy II, a known bibliophile, requested from Eleazar, the high priest of Jerusalem, a copy of “the Law of the Jews” for the library of Alexandria. According to the Letter of Aristeas, six translators were commissioned from each tribe for a grand total of seventy-two translators. They labored seventy-two days, […]

In my previous post , I took up the question of God’s beauty. In this penultimate post, we move to the question of God’s goodness. If the question of beauty takes the form of worrying that God is a killjoy, the question of goodness worries that God is a killer simpliciter. Not only is His […]