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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I have argued elsewhere that the Omride dynasty is a counterfeit Davidic dynasty, and that in this structure Ahab is a counterfeit Solomon. John Van Seters suggests in a 2000 Presidential address to La societe canadienne des etudes bibliques that Ahab is also a Davidic character, at least in the…
Bruce McCormack?s article on justification, alluded to in an earlier post, is quite good. He rightly points out that ?the term ?justification?Ehas its home in the judicial sphere,?Ebut equally rightly points out that God?s judgments are different from human judgments: ?God?s verdict differs in that it creates the reality it…
Princeton’s Bruce McCormack protests against the “uncritical expansion of the concept of perichoresis today on the past of a good many theologians.” He suggests that the term “is rightly employed in trinitarian discourse for describing that which is dissimilar in the analogy between intra-trinitarian relations among the divine ‘person’ on…
Berkhof has some intriguing comments about the distinction between “active or objective” justification and “passive or subjective” justification. The first refers to the declaration that God makes concerning the sinner, that the demands of the law have been met and the sinner is considered righteous for Christ’s sake. In this…
If ?justify?Eis both a verdict (?this person is righteous?E and the carrying out of a sentence (?this person is delivered from slavery to Sin?E, then clearly justification cannot be based on anything that the righteous person does. Justification is purely by grace. So, the ?deliverdict?Econstruction of justification does not turn…
If ?justify?Eis both a verdict (?this person is righteous?E and the carrying out of a sentence (?this person is delivered from slavery to Sin?E, then clearly justification cannot be based on anything that the righteous person does. Justification is purely by grace. So, the ?deliverdict?Econstruction of justification does not turn…
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