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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Richard Finn begins his Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire with a summary of the Sentences of Sextus , a Hellenstic Pythatorean work adapted to Christian use by Rufinus. According to the text, gifts of money, food, or clothing to the poor was “an activity which met with God’s blessing…
C. John Collins has observed that it is common to set Torah and the Wisdom books in opposition to each other. The former is covenantal and specific to Israel; Wisdom is based on observation of creation and history. The contrast is exaggerated at best, and in a 2o09 article is…
Cicero wanted to defend the reality of human freedom against the Stoics. But the issue of divine foreknowledge stood in the way. How could human choices be truly free if God knew those choices ahead of time? As Augustine summarized Cicero’s concern ( City of God , 5.9), “if all…
S tephen John Wright’s Dogmatic Aesthetics offers a dogmatic treatment of beauty using the work of Robert Jenson. Though Jenson hasn’t written a theological aesthetics, Wright is correct that Jenson’s work is shot through with aesthetic concerns: “Jenson’s theology is irreducibly aesthetic.” One of Jenson’s fundamental claims is that the…
B ig law is dying says Benjamin Barton in his forthcoming Glass Half Full . In fact, it’s dying four times over. There’s death from above, death from below, death from the state, death from the side. From above, large law firms have been huge and hugely profitable since the…
In his massive study of Jewish Influence on Christian Reform Movements , Louis Newman claims that the “Mosaic Books have never held a dominant place in orthodox Christianity; it is only among special groups that the Pentateuch has won adherence,” groups where “literal acceptance of the Code” was “a fundamental…
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