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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Stanford’s Carl N. Degler’s In Search of Human Nature tells the story of the contest between biological and cultural determinists in the social sciences. Much of late 19th-century social science was shaped by a crude Darwinian paradigm. Biological factors like race and sex were considered to be the chief determinants…
One of the many ironies of contemporary political discourse is the co-option of Malthus by the political left, for the Rev. Thomas Malthus was undoubtedly a man of the right. His Essay on the Principle of Population was an anti-utopian tract designed to refute what Malthus called, in his original…
Christian apologetics tends to focus on ethical or rational arguments. Questions such as “Can we be good without God?” and “Does that being exist than which nothing greater can be conceived?” and “What are the transcendental conditions of knowledge?” have dominated the field. A good historical argument can be made,…
A number of years ago, Stanley Jaki, a Roman Catholic historian of science, published an article in Modern Age defending the technological acumen of medievals. He cited three medieval inventions that provide evidence “of the striking modernity ofthe Middle Ages.” So many innovations came from the Middle Ages that “as…
Much of the following is borrowed from James Jordan’s lectures on Ecclesiastes given at the 2005 Biblical Horizons Summer Conference. INTRODUCTION Life in the twenty-first century is frantic and ever-changing. Today’s styles quickly become passé, old skills are soon useless, nothing holds still long enough to harden into habit. Ecclesiastes…
In Ecclesiastes, Solomon offers intriguing, somewhat paradoxical reflections on the problems of change and permanence. On the one hand, the reality that provokes his opening lament that the world is “vapor” is the apparently unchanging permanence: The sun rises and sets day after day, the rivers flow into the seas…
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