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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Orestes Brownson has some sharp insights on the purposes and effects of social contract theory as developed by early modern theorists. He recognizes that Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau have detached social contract ideas from their original mooring in Christian thought and “abused the phrase borrowed from the theologians and made…
Poetry is a concentrated excess of language. Concentrated because it always means more than it says. Excessive because it always says more than it needs to say, because in many cases it need not be said at all. Concentration: “The Lord is my shepherd” unlatches a window on an alternative…
Thinking about Plato’s Crito, it again strikes me that NOMOS is closer to what our “culture” than to “law.” If Paul is entering into a Greek debate about NOMOS (as well, of course, as a Jewish one), then he’s critiquing the notion that justice can be achieved through the institutions…
CONTEXT AND STRUCTURE Proverbs 8 follows Proverbs 7. In chapter 7, Solomon records the speech of Lady Folly, the adulteress, who entices the simple to her house for a night of love-making. In chapter 8, Solomon records the speech of Lady Wisdom, who offers herself as the means to rule,…
Last week, The New Republic posted a lengthy article by Jerry Coyne on Intelligent Design (ID) on its web site, along with a brief piece by Leon Wieseltier. Yesterday, the local paper carried a brief excerpt from the Columbus, Ohio, Dispatch, claiming that ID should be recognized as veiled philosophy…
INTRODUCTION According to Ephesians, the gospel is about God’s formation of a new humanity. This is true in two senses: First, in Jesus, the Last Adam, believers are made new Adams and Eves; and, second, in Jesus the divided human race is united into a new family, the temple of…
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