There is a tendency within Christian morality to become unduly precise. We look at the warning passages of Scripture and sigh with exhaustion, pondering the seemingly unanswerable question: am I truly saved? The reason I call this question ‘seemingly unanswerable’ is because it has persisted since the early church with the third century controversy of… Read More ‘Assurance is the Essence of Faith’: Against Moral Precisionism in Conversation with 2 Cor 13:5 and 2 Pet 1:10

In the first installment of this series, we concluded by stating that a theological ethic must be grounded in love toward God and toward human beings, with this love, in turn, finding its ground in the risen Christ. This second installment in our series continues to clear the ground, as it were, before entering into… Read More Toward a Political Theology: Part II: The Law of God and The End of the Ethical

We are in a political age, a deeply political one. Therefore, we are in an age when Christians ought to be producing theological accounts which speak to political concerns. Indeed, political theologies, if you will, ought to be abounding and, in some circles, they are. It’s important to clarify that the political, the public sphere,… Read More Toward a Political Theology: Part I: God’s Love and the Ethical

When the world is turned upside down, so often our faces turn against God. We turn against him and speak of his betrayal against us because we believe, somehow, in some way, God has done evil to us. There is no question that suffering is an evil, though if it is an evil with the… Read More The Eschatological Suffering of the Christian in Hebrews 12

In my last post, I argued that because we are embodied human beings, resulting in our occupation of a certain time, space and indeed sociocultural place that there is warrant for the concerns of liberation theology. Given sociocultural places wherein one’s place is adjudicated vis-à-vis the other, there is in fact the need to speak… Read More Jesus the Liberator – the Theological Grounding of Liberation

In our time and place, and perhaps in every time and place, people are crying out for a sense of identity, a sense of belonging, which is, ultimately, a sense of meaning. We are meaning making creatures that are ever vigilant of the need to draw meaning out of ourselves, the world around us and… Read More Is Liberation Theology Wrong?, or, the Embodied Nature of the Christian Faith

In an earlier post, I discussed how Christ levels all of our self-congratulatory posturing by the truth of the gospel. Thus, the reason why the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, I argued, is because it, like fear, undoes us. Yet, it’s important to add that we are undone by God because… Read More Christ the Great Leveler; or, Love for the Other in light of the Fear of the Lord

Politics can be difficult. It is often, somewhat humorously, described as one of three things that shouldn’t be discussed with mixed company. Political views are often strongly held to and prove to be divisive even among loved ones and friends. We all have political views, no matter how much people protest to the contrary. The… Read More Politics: A Theological Correction; or, Political Views In the Light of Jesus

Solomon, the likely author and compiler of the book of Proverbs, writes, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (9:10). ‘Fear’ is a strange word to modern ears. It usually does not carry with it a positive connotation. One does not usually place ‘fear’ alongside ‘happy’ in a sentence. Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB) defines… Read More Christ the Great Leveler

I recently heard it stated, building on the approach of John Sailhamer, that background studies is not necessary to understand the text of Scripture. It is argued that there is nothing in Scripture that dictates using anything outside of the text to understanding or apply the text. While there is some validity to this argument,… Read More Should We Reject Background Studies for Interpreting the Bible?