27 articles from 22 issues, 1995 to 2022
Pastors run spiritual formation programs without often pausing to ask what 'spirit' actually means. Vanhoozer treats that question as a load-bearing one for ministry: what we think the human spirit is shapes everything we do to form it. He follows the biblical words to a working answer.
Billings is dying of cancer, and the bones inside him are described by a doctor as 'like Swiss cheese.' He writes about how Christians and the wider culture talk about death, and why those two ways of talking diverge so sharply at the end.
Partee opens with the wry observation that doctrine unites and reason divides, then surveys the rubble Reformed Christians have made of their own family identity. The piece is part lament, part invitation: an honest reckoning with what's been neglected and what still might be retrieved.
Hylton encouraged his congregation to mark the Reformation's 500th anniversary, then noticed that the popular media coverage focused mostly on Luther's failings. He pulls three pastoral insights from Luther's example, the kind that hold up regardless of what we think of his weaker moments.
What would Augustine say to a culture that chases fulfillment through fame, sex and shopping? In an opening statement for a staged debate with Bertrand Russell, Carl Trueman argues that Augustine would read our hunger as love turned in on itself.
What does a prayer written sixteen hundred years ago say about a restless heart? Herbert Jacobsen reads Augustine’s Confessions through three themes, human restlessness, the mystery of God and the affections, and finds each held together by grace.
Centrifugal force in physics pushes a body away from the center. Mills uses Buechner's lexicon entry on sin (also centrifugal) to argue that theological boundaries do for the church what asphalt does for a car: not constrict, but keep us from flying off the road into wreckage.
How can Calvin speak of human dignity and of total depravity in the same breath? Michael Horton traces the paradox of a glorious creation and a willful fall through the Institutes, and asks why the modern church has lost both halves.
Can lust be managed by degrees? Preaching on Matthew 5:27-30, Kevin Finch confesses his years as a “moral minimizer” and urges hearers to take Jesus’ drastic words at full strength: tear sin out, run from it as Joseph did, and trust God.
How does what we believe shape the way we see life and death? This Presbyterians Pro-Life curriculum, three sessions with questions for discussion, sets out a biblical worldview, the authority of Scripture and what it means to be made in God’s image.
Why has sin become the one subject nobody will mention? Stephen Eyre turns to the Heidelberg Catechism’s nine questions on sin to show how it joins law to relationship, and offers questions for reflection.
Can the church say anything about abortion when the word is not in the Bible? Terry Schlossberg takes the question through creation, redemption, the church, forgiveness and the resurrection, and shows that the Christian view of life grows out of the faith’s central doctrines.
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