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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Aseity is the property that describes a being’s self-causation. In theology, to speak of divine aseity is to say that God exists in and of Himself. He is not derived from or dependent upon anything else. He is fully Himself in Himself and of Himself. He is a se .…
Naomi Koltun-Fromm argues ( Hermeneutics of Holiness ) that the concepts of purity and holiness, while normally distinct in the Hebrew Bible, are blurred in some passages where qadash is used in contexts that speak of purity and purification rather than of consecration. In 1 Samuel 21:6, David says that…
Explaining Ezra’s concern about the mixed marriages in the restoration community, Naomi Koltun-Fromm ( Hermeneutics of Holiness ) writes, “Ezra presents Israel not only as holy but as a qodesh in its own right—a freestanding holy thing, a holy seed, a sanctum. As such, it must be protected (or in…
In his contribution to Seeing Things Their Way , Richard Muller discusses and commends the recent effort to free church history from denominational apologetics. When the Reformers are viewed in the light of late medieval theology (as in the work of Heiko Oberman), unexpected commonalities appear: “Common ground can be…
At the end of Albert Camus’s The Stranger , the narrator is on death row for killing an Arab. Death is familiar to him. It is the “black wind” that has blown through his entire life. For Camus’s Stranger, the inevitability of death makes life indifferent. It does not matter…
In his recent Zero to One , Peter Thiel sets out a neat typology of philosophy, politics, and cultural attitudes based on differing stances toward the future. He distinguishes optimists and pessimists, and subdivides each into “definite” and “indefinite.” Optimists and pessimists are obvious: One is bullish about the future,…
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