133 articles from 83 issues, 1995 to 2026
Why does Presbyterian identity feel so vague and contested? Drawing on Charles Taylor’s “authenticity” and “the buffered self,” Joseph Small diagnoses the culture behind the disarray and points toward koinonia and shared theological work.
In the second part of his essay, Richard Burnett follows Bonhoeffer from London to Finkenwalde and on to his warnings about American Christianity, then asks what the visible church owes the world today.
Why does the word evangelism make so many mainline Christians anxious? Raymond Hylton turns to the Great Commission in Galilee, arguing that witness rests on Christ’s authority, not on our management of outcomes.
Right belief or right worship? Doctrine or doxology? Drawing on Chesterton, Athanasius, and Calvin, Richard Burnett presents orthodoxy as a costly, moving equilibrium, never stuffy and never still, that has carried the church through every storm.
Spiritual autobiographies remind us how the Spirit sustains faith through the long road. Drawing on Schweitzer, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Douglas F. Fletcher names ten weapons against evil and reflects on perseverance as a gift God himself secures.
Gen Z talks about romance as an unbearable rulebook crushing them. Kosari hears the same paralysis in our churches, where marriage has become an idol no one can quite picture. She turns to Isaiah 52, where the Lord woos his Jerusalem out of captivity, for a different vision.
Burgess opens with a year he spent at an East Berlin seminary in the 1980s, when Marxism-Leninism claimed total interpretive authority. Forty years later, he hears the Barmen Declaration's refusal of competing 'lords' speaking again to a church tempted by every ideology offering easier answers than Christ.
From Mark 2, Burnett walks through Christ's habit of dining with sinners and tax collectors. What does the divine yes to the wrong people require us to refuse? Especially now, in a moment when the church most wants to say yes to everything.
At the close of his seventh decade, Burgess takes stock alongside the Bonhoeffer of the prison letters, asking the same question Bonhoeffer asked: who am I? The address is a meditation on identity, ministry, and what we hope to leave the generation that follows.
Ninety years ago a small group of pastors and elders in Barmen refused the Nazis' attempt to colonize the gospel. Working revisits Karl Barth's text and finds a confession that still names the temptation: any blood-and-soil ideology that asks the church to add another word to the one Word of God.
Crocco listens to a psychiatrist friend who can't say what she actually thinks about gender dysphoria treatment without losing her license. The conversation pulls Solzhenitsyn's plea to 'live not by lies' from the Soviet bloc into our own moment, and asks what costs Christians should expect.
Bergler's earlier book diagnosed how American churches absorbed the values of adolescence; this follow-up asks what maturity looks like and how congregations get there. Offered as an introduction to From Here to Maturity, with the editor's recommendation to read both volumes.
In print, to anyone who asks.
"Sustained by readers."
Theology Matters is sent in print to anyone who requests it, sustained primarily by readers like you. Tax-deductible.
Give a Gift