Augustine’s Confessions is a great book. It has been read by the greats: great minds and great saints—from Petrarch in the sixteenth century to Sigmund Freud, Albert Camus, and Hannah Arendt in the twentieth. It cannot be ignored. We read...
Sometimes we feel spiritually dry. When your own inner life feels more barren than bountiful, James 4:8 offers a two-step path toward spiritual renewal and refreshment: Confession Repentance. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your...
As interest in traditional churches and liturgy has grown among evangelicals, there is also growing curiosity about liturgical terms and actions such as confession, absolution, and benediction. Because the word “absolution” has changed in meaning...
I grew up in the church, just not an Anglican church. My journey into the Anglican fold is a story for another time, but I bring it up here because that experience strongly informs this selection of Anglican books you should know. These books were...
How many different ways can we apologize to God? Quite a few, actually. And in the ancient prayers of God’s people—in Scripture and outside it—their focus quite often turned to confession or its many related expressions: remorse, guilt...
What is idolatry? Idolatry is seeking ultimate security and significance in that which is not ultimate. It is also an inversion of the original relationship between the Creator and the human creature. Man and woman were created as images of God...
We call ourselves Christians. This name was first given to us in the city of Antioch. It distinguished the disciples of Jesus—those who professed him to be the Messiah or the Christ—from other Jews of the day. Christians continue to be identified by...
Jesus chose to make Nazareth the site of one of the most significant and enigmatic declarations of his early ministry. As the community was gathered in the synagogue for Sabbath, he said: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. What did Jesus mean? Why...
It’s a very catchy song. A mysterious minor key, a melody that sticks in your ear, cadences that just ache their way to resolution. It is also ubiquitous—and received uncritically by many who hear it. The song Mary, Did You Know? is as much a...
Joan Osborne’s 1995 pop hit What If God Was One of Us? asked an excellent question. Another song, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing—a famous hymn of Charles Wesley and George Whitefield—gives the correct answer. The ancient world had many deities, even...
I get the opportunity to work with Logos users regularly. I was recently asked whether or not there is a simple way to incorporate noteworthy blog posts within one’s Logos library. I'd like to suggest a method that connects saved notes to particular...
Charles Spurgeon criticized Robert Hawker's Bible commentary for seeing Jesus in unnecessary places, such as every Psalm, a view widely held in Christian interpretation until John Calvin rooted Psalm interpretation in historical context. There's now...
Over the course of history, theologians, commentators, preachers, and readers of the Bible have pondered what it means to be justified by faith in Christ, as Paul says in Galatians 2:16 (LEB). There are several knots that we have to untie when it...
When I was sixteen, a youth ministry challenged me to share my faith with my family and classmates. I had grown up in and out of church and didn’t know much of the Bible beyond the epic Sunday school stories most people with some church background...
Genesis 3:8 is a familiar verse in a familiar story: Adam and Eve have sinned, and now, in the cool of the day, they hear the sound of the Lord God walking in the Garden. Afraid, they hide among the trees.
For five hundred years, the term “Lutheran” has served variously as a badge of confession for a specific definition of Christian, for Martin Luther’s supporters, as a word of insult used by foes to condemn a variety of views opposed to their own, or...
Anglicanism is a religious identity claimed by millions of faithful Christians across the globe. In fact, the Anglican Communion is the third largest Christian communion of churches after Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. It is a tradition...
What does Pentecostal mean? The word comes from the Greek pentekoste, which means fiftieth. This will explore how Pentecostalism began, the first hundred years of the movement, and how Pentecostalism differs from Evangelicalism.
It’s common for Christians today to think of their church bodies as denominations; that is, different varieties of a common religion. This tendency is so pervasive that churches who want to shed conventional labels will even call themselves non...
What is Reformed theology? In the land where the Azusa Street Revival, International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, Calvary Chapel, and Saddleback Church had their birth and continue their influence, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been...
The Bible is explicit that God revealed ten Words to his people at Sinai and it stands to reason that we should know how to number them, especially given the unique status these Words bear in Scripture.
When he speaks of the kingdom of God, Jesus simultaneously captures our greatest dreams and summarizes the drama of salvation history. The idea of God’s own kingdom is evocative: the ideal society, utopia, paradise. A kingdom in which all citizens...
Poet Robert Frost famously wrote about two roads that diverged in a yellow wood, and he expressed regret that he could not take both paths. This captures a universal human experience: as finite humans, a yes to one path is necessarily a no to the...
If we wish to understand the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we must begin with seeing them as a part of the creational order. Trees, along with plants and seed-bearing things, come to life by the word of God as part of...
Even beyond the earliest examples in the book of Acts, Christians throughout history have experienced many of the same challenges and frustrations we face. They wrestled with materialism and obedience to God, with sharing their faith and worries and...
Writing and delivering well-communicated, biblically faithful sermons demands our study and energy. But having the right tools can help us in that effort. In this article, we’ll survey some of the best tools and resources available to preachers in...
If someone or something has ever put the fear of God in you, it likely wasn’t a positive experience. And you’d be happy if it never happened again. That cultural idiom is resoundingly negative. But the Bible calls the fear of the Lord the beginning...
In recent years, the Trinity has been one of the most hotly debated topics in the theology world, and for good reason: What we believe about the Trinity shapes the way we think about and worship our God. Understanding the Trinity itself—one God in...
Christians do not have unique possession of the ethical, of what is good and right. The Greeks wrote of the good life; today many different guilds work carefully to police the professional ethics of their respective fields. And plenty of other...
Which theologians are people searching for online? Here are sixteen of the most searched theologians (in no particular order) from all traditions—along with a few comments about each and a few books each has written. 1. Karl Barth First is Karl...
