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Theopolis News

2015 Biblical Horizons Conference

This year’s Biblical Horizons conference was another great success and we would like to thank all those who were involved by helping out with the catering or opening up their homes to attendees and speakers. The talks, open-ended as they were, offered a fresh perspective and food for thought on…

by Abi KayJuly 30, 2015
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Children

Training Tools

I find myself often rehearsing conversations with my children. When the house is quiet in the late evening, and I'm standing in front of a pile of soapy dishes, I think about what I am going to say to them in certain situations. When I am driving in the car,…

by Lindsey TollefsonJuly 30, 2015
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Biblical Studies

Cosmic Language, (Part 1)

In Matthew 24:29 , Jesus employs “cosmic language,” signs in the sun, moon and stars, to predict the imminent end of the Old Covenant. His first-century audience would have recognized His allusion to the prophecy against Babylon in Isaiah 13 and understood His discourse as a condemnation of Jerusalem as…

by Mike BullJuly 28, 2015
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Revelation

Triune God of Israel

The Enthroned One speaks to John (Revelation 21:6): “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost.” It's a little theology proper. For starters, there's the Greek version of…

by Peter LeithartJuly 23, 2015
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Homosexuality

Stealing a Page from Our Playbook

In reading about how we got into this mess, I came across a very interesting couple of paragraphs that I think the church could learn from if we are going to counter the Obergefell ruling. Prior to 2009, same sex “marriage” had gone to the ballot box thirty-one times in…

by Rich LuskJuly 21, 2015
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Literature

From Garden to Gate of Hell

In my previous essay on Macbeth , I pointed out that Shakespeare rewrote Scottish history to construct a play which points to Adam’s Fall — a man and a woman tempted by devils to steal the throne and become like gods. It is hard to imagine anyone in Shakespeare’s day…

by Ralph Allan SmithJuly 16, 2015

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Atonement

Not the Foundation

Jeremy Treat’s The Crucified King is a salutary attempt to heal the breach in biblical and systematic theology between the kingdom and the cross. The goal of creation is to establish “God’s reign through his servant-kings over creation” (40), and that is what Jesus’ ministry, death, and resurrection aimed at:…

May 15, 2014

Creative Delay

It’s now possible to watch an entire season of a TV show in a couple of nights. If you don’t have to get up too early the next day, a long night will do the trick. Robin Sloan argues that we miss something when we binge, and not just commercial…

May 14, 2014

Reconsecrating the Sanctuary

The day of atonement (or “day of coverings”) involved a re-investiture of the priest. At the beginning of the rite, he removed his garments of glory (Leviticus 16:3) and at the end of the day he put them back on (16:23-24). Before the rites, he bathed his body (16:4) and…

May 14, 2014

Spirit Realized By Matter

J.R. Illingworth explains in Divine Immanence that consciousness, mind, and the human spirit are realized only materially. He is not reductive. Thought is not simply the firing of synapses. But “Our every state of consciousness depends, as we have seen, upon the brain, and therefore upon the blood that nourishes…

May 14, 2014
Uncategorized

Serious Entertainment

D. Brent Laytham suggests that entertainment falls into the biblical category of a “power,” a good aspect of creation designed to “give, sustain, and enrich life” but one that, in a fallen world, tends to “turn away from God, becoming self-referential and self-aggrandizing” ( iPod, YouTube, Wii Play , 27).…

May 14, 2014

Holy War and Secularization

Philip Jenkins’s latest, The Great and Holy War , examines the religious dimensions of World War I. On all sides, he observes, it was characterized as a holy war, a comic battle that would culminate in Armageddon and perhaps usher in an eschatological order. In fact it was, as Andrew…

May 14, 2014

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