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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Joseph Mangina ( Revelation , 248) summarizes David Barr's ( Tales of the End ) analysis of the parallels between Revelation 22 and the Didache 's depiction of early Christian Eucharist: “both Rev. 22 and the Didache (a) allude to Jesus's descent from David, (b) draw a sharp distinction between…
“‘Empire’ is a grand word,” write John Darwin at the beginning of his Unfinished Empire . On the ground, the reality of empire is “a mass of individuals, a network of lobbies, a mountain of hopes: for careers, fortunes, religious salvation or just physical safety. Empires were not made by…
Premillennialism - the view that Jesus returns to reign in person at the beginning of a literal one-thousand-year golden age - is often criticized these days for being defeatist, spiritualist, gnostic. It was not always so. As Martin Spence shows in his excellent Heaven on Earth , early critics of…
Four times in Revelation, John is directly told not to do something. When he falls at the feet of Jesus, Jesus touches him with his right hand and says, “Do not fear” (1:17; Gr. me phobou ). When no one in heaven, earth, or under earth can be found to…
Responding to Eugene McCarraher, John Milbank gives a brief overview of the complex interactions of European imperial powers, the church, and the colonized. Contrary to some popular opinion, “Missionaries were often opponents of military, economic and settler empire as has now been abundantly shown by historians. In a parallel fashion,…
When Dvorak's New World Symphony debuted in New York, it was hailed as a masterpiece, the American symphony that American composers had tried, and failed, to produce. Which American composers would those be? Douglas Shadle's Orchestrating the Nation answers the question. It's a question contemporary symphony-goers need answered too. As…
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