Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Failure of the Church Yet a third factor played an important role in this historical development, in addition to the imperial adoption of icons and the rise of the icons of the holy man. Brown writes: "The great Christian basilicas of the previous centuries tended to stand empty, except…
The three large patriarchal narratives of Genesis concern the three aspects of the cosmos: matter, space, and time. Over these three is man given dominion. Lucifer was originally appointed to train man in this dominion, but he chose to lead man into rebellion instead. Thus, the Angel of Yahweh replaced…
Part 6: Living in a Dying World (continued) The "Trivium" (continued) The five stages of education are simply the five stages of the covenant as God administers it in human life and history, and in the liturgy of covenant renewal: First, God announces Himself. "I am Yahweh Your God." He…
The following essay is tentative and exploratory, offered for your consideration. It seems to me that the ritual of the Ascension Offering (incorrectly translated as Burnt Offering) of Leviticus 1 is a symbolic recapitulation of Genesis 1, which thereby portrays the sacrificial ritual as way of moving from a fallen…
Just as the vast majority of evangelical Christians in America today are Arminian and Baptist, so the vast majority do not believe in a creation around 4000 BC. I don’t expect any of these three situations to change anytime soon. Powerful presuppositions are at work in all three instances, along…
The Iconoclastic Controversy Continuing Pagan Influence How did images creep in? To begin with, there was in the post-Constantinian Church a concerted effort on the part of the semi-pagans to interpret Christianity in essentially pantheistic terms. The heretics put God and man on a continuum of "being," so that God…
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Mundus reconciliatus Ecclesia (Augustine, Sermon 96). “The world reconciled is the church.”
In his 1987 book on Thomas’s ecclesiology, George Sabra argues that Thomas does not teach that the church is a continuing incarnation. He definitely rejects any notion that the church is deified. If the notion of “continuing incarnation” simply means that the church continues the work of the incarnation, it…
Thomas wrote no treatise on the church, but Yves Congar, among others, insisted that the whole second part of the Summa is about ecclesiology. Thomas is telling a story of exodus and return, and the second part of his treatise is about the return effected by Christ and worked out…
In the Poetics , Aristotle gives a brief description of the character and history of comedy: ” Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type - not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the…
INTRODUCTION In the final chapter of his prophecy, Micah speaks in the first person, as the representative Israelite. In the midst of social chaos, he waits on Yahweh to show His righteousness. Someday, the Lord who treads on Judah’s high places (1:3) will tread her iniquities and cast them into…
In Micah 6:4, Yahweh reminds Judah, “I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.” The “send before” reminds us of Yahweh’s promise to send His angel before Israel as they traveled through the wilderness and into the land. Moses, Aaron, and Miriam are human analogues to the Angel of Yahweh.…
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