Jesus Christ

Throughout history, people have been fascinated by angels, those mysterious beings who pop up in Scripture at important times. Around the Christmas story, there are lots of angels. They worship God the Trinity. They serve at God’s bidding. They never sit in God’s presence. They never share God’s...

Who is Jesus? Any Christian might easily answer this question by reaching for her Bible and turning to the gospels. But advocates of the New Perspective on Paul (NPP) would be quick to caution against such a naïve response. “Oh,” they might say, “you can know something about Jesus from reading the...

A simple Google search of “Olympia Morata” and “feminist” yields 6,530 results. Some call her “a forgotten, feminist voice” or “a feminist in Renaissance Italy.” These definitions would have puzzled her. She was highly esteemed in her day, but for different reasons. A Child Prodigy We don’t know...

One of the aspects of the New Perspective of Paul is a focus on the corporate, as opposed the individual, aspects of justification and salvation. In the Christian church today, there is a move by some to “correct” an overemphasis on the individual believer. The desire is to focus on the corporate...

Since the 1980s, a movement called the New Perspective on Paul has been a rising star in Biblical studies and Pauline scholarship. The movement primarily started through the writings of E.P. Sanders’ 1977 Paul and Palestinian Judaism as he explored the Second Temple Jewish texts and reexamined what...

I n this final installment of the series on union and communion with Christ, I will continue to consider practical benefits of this doctrine. More specifically, I will look at how we might use this doctrine to spur us on towards love and good deeds. Thomas Lye, in his sermon entitled, The True...

In the Western world at least, the glory of the church seems to be fading fast. Far from those days when her influence was far-reaching and wide-ranging, her values and opinions respected and her numbers strong; she has become the object of public ridicule and, too often, seen as the great...

More on the Benefit of Christ My earlier post on the 16th-century booklet The Benefit of Christ has elicited many responses. Several people have pointed me to this edition https://archive.org/details/benefitchristsd00palegoog , which I had seen before. It’s not a faithful translation and is written...

Beware the church that is always trying to make Christianity cool again; far more often than not, their hearts are preoccupied with what the world wants than what God wants. Of course it could be argued that Christianity has never been cool. That’s fine. St. John’s Revelation of Jesus Christ...

I n this penultimate installment of the series on a puritan doctrine of union and communion with Christ, I want to consider the comfort “this glorious union with Christ” brings to dying saints and to “their surviving mourners” (Case). Thomas Jacomb says that we have no reason to be afraid of death...