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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I’ve posted a paper by a student, Lisa Beyeler, that traces out connections between Jeremiah and Galatians. Click on “Downloads” at the top of the page, and you’ll find it.
Hart again: “a society is truly modern to the extent that it is post-Christian.” That is, “modernity is not simply a ‘postreligious’ condition; it is the state of a society that has been specifically a Christian society but has ‘lost the faith.’ The ethical presuppositions intrinsic to modernity, for instance,…
In his new book, Atheist Delusion s, David Bentley Hart calls attention to the role of the church in providing medical care during the middle ages: “in the diakoniai of Constantinople, for centures, many rich members of the laity labored to care for the poor and ill, bathing the sick,…
Chalmers Johnson ( Sorrows of American Empire , and author of Blowback ) describes the American empire as an “empire of military bases”: “As of September 2001, the Department of Defense acknowledged at least 725 American military bases existed outside the United States. Actually, there are many more, since some…
Ross Douthat writes, “If the Western leadership class survives the current crisis, after all, the lesson they’re going to draw from it is relatively simple: We must never let this happen again . And while that impulse could be a spur to greater decentralization and democratization, it’s more likely to…
Calvin refers to Constantine only a handful of times in the Institutes , mainly in connection with the Donation. At one point, though, he comments him for restraining the intemperance of fourth-century churchmen (4.9.10): “when the primary article of our faith was there in peril, and Arius, its enemy, was…
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