So began a session yesterday on the book of Job in the Torrey Honors Institute. The question, posed by myself and my colleague Matt Jenson, was intended to start a discussion on Job's interactions with his friends, especially Elihu. It may seem like an odd, off the mark question given that Job was "blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil" (Job 1:1). ...
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Jesus is God, but did he know during his earthly ministry that he was God? Was he, as a human, aware of his divinity? I think it is necessary, for biblical and logical reasons, to answer yes to this question, but I freely admit that doing so raises further difficult questions and forces us to affirm an incarnation of the Word that staggers the imagination.
How could someb...
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We should pay more attention to the doctrine of divine blessedness. I have been pondering it lately, noticing it everywhere in older theological writing, and wondering how to give this great doctrine more weight and emphasis.
Beatitude, blessedness, is a divine attribute. It is a perfection of God's being. Blessedness has occupied an ambiguous place within the structure o...
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Richard Rogers (1550-1618) was a Puritan pastor who noticed that people had lots of questions about how to live the Christian life. They asked very detailed and specific questions, but none of the devotional books available in his time gave correspondingly detailed answers. There were a few Roman Catholic books that got down to specifics, but their Catholic ideas about grac...
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Consciousness is among the most mystifying features of the cosmos. Geoffrey Madell opines that "the emergence of consciousness, then is a mystery, and one to which materialism signally fails to provide an answer."[i] Naturalist Colin McGinn claims that its arrival borders on sheer magic because there seems to be no naturalistic explanation for it: "How can mere matter origi...
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Global warming will kill us all. Lowered sun spot activity will soon cause a new ice age. We are about to face a famine. We have an "epidemic of obesity." Terrorists are certain to use nuclear weapons to bomb a major U.S. city. The global war on terror is hype designed to take away our civil liberties and usher in a fascist state.
These are all stories I have read fairly r...
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And Jesus said, "Father,forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Jesus was dying.
He did not deserve to die, but He had been sentenced by the rulers of his day to death out of envy, fear, and pride. Roman crucifixion was a horrible way to die and He was near the end.
Wicked persons have historically tried to blame particular groups for the death of Jesus. This ...
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Any good catechism includes the Lord's Prayer, broken up line by line and explained. The Heidelberg Catechism includes such a commentary on the Lord's Prayer in its final ten questions (120-129), and it is excellent. Click through to read the full discussion in question and answer format.
From that discussion, I culled the basic interpretation of each line of the prayer...
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The Getty Center in Los Angeles is not really the best place to go if you want to see Christian art. Except for the remarkable collection of illuminated manuscripts, the Getty's collection just isn't built around the themes and images of the Christian visual tradition --it started as a collection of French furniture and antiquities, and snowballed from there. Go to the Getty...
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Featured Essay
Once upon a time there was a man who thought he was dead. His wife tried everything she could to convince him he was very much alive. But try as she may, he would not change his mind. After several weeks of this, she finally took him to the doctor who assured the man he was alive. Sadly, it was to no avail. Suddenly, the doctor got an idea. He convinced the man that dead ...
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For sheer awkwardness, there's not much to compare with the moment when a friend hands you a book and says, "Here, this is my first novel, I hope you enjoy it." That happened to me this January.
I was lucky, though: the friend was Craig Hazen, and the book was Five Sacred Crossings: A Novel Approach to a Reasonable Faith. This is a good book, a good idea carried out wel...
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The word "Trinity" is not in the Bible, true enough. But don't let the fanciness of the word "Trinity" throw you, it just means "threeness." I was looking around in some Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, Bible commentaries a while ago, and saw that the word "Trinity" showed up there just as "thrynnysse." I was getting used to the weirdness of Anglo Saxon; to seeing the Almighty ...
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