In the present, we must make concrete, “earthy” appeals to personal narratives that reveal brokenness and to emotions that testify to the Creator. As we do so, we remember that God’s general revelation speaks internally as well as externally. It is here that we take felt needs captive and expose real needs as well as their remedy.
What really set Christianity apart in the ancient world was the incarnation—the claim that the Most High God had himself entered into the realm of matter, taking on a physical body. In Gnosticism, the highest deity would have nothing to do with the material world. By contrast, the Christian message is that the transcendent God […]
Every day, the twenty-four hour news cycle chronicles the advance of a secular moral revolution in areas such as sexuality, abortion, homosexuality, and transgenderism. It’s easy to get caught up in the latest controversy, but current events are merely surface effects, like waves on the ocean. The real action happens below the surface, at the […]
“The females were then less esteemed, but not so in Christ; for in Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female” [Matthew Henry’s commentary on Gal. 3:28]. Recently a friend of mine was reading through Leviticus in her daily Bible readings. As she finished the book, she came across the valuations in chapter 27: “Speak […]
The story of humanity laid out in divine revelation begins in Genesis 1–2 with the creation of Adam and Eve, the first human pair. It shifts in Genesis 3:6 with their partaking of fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which God commanded Adam and Eve not to eat from. In […]
Though the soul animates the body and not the other way around, being embodied is essential to being a human being. A human is body and soul. The soul is not spatially constrained but nevertheless is properly located in the body, though not in any one part. Rather, the soul pervades (or “infuses) the body, […]
If you have watched an episode of the Japanese anime Ghost in the shell or seen the Netflix sci-fiction Movie Altered Carbon, you may be familiar with the question whether ever-upgrading technologies will eventually bring humanity beyond their current natural limitations. But it is not just sci-fi works that are asking this question. Serious-minded scholars […]
In 1643, Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate asked the philosopher René Descartes for some explanations about his theories on the distinction about the body and the mind – the same mind he had made the starting point for the confirmation of all knowledge in his Cogito ergo sum argument (“I think, therefore I am”). Elisabeth, […]
Having written about the Reformed orthodox endorsement of metaphysics (though not a simply agreed upon endorsement, it must be said; there was debate about the role and limits of philosophy in theology among the Reformed), it is also important, in order to fill out the historical picture a bit further, to note a common line […]