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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It sure seems that the story of Joseph is a typological foreshadowing of the life of Jesus. Joseph is hated by his brothers; turned over to Gentiles; falsely accused; thrown into pit and prison; raised up, finally set on a throne, from which he gathers and distributes bread. Of course,…
Jock Young ( Vertigo of Late Modernity ) discerns two sorts of “othering” in contemporary life: “the first is a conservative demonisation which projects negative attributes on the other and thereby grants positive attributes to oneself The second, very common yet rarely recognised, is a liberal othering where the other…
In several dense paragraphs in The Fragmented World of the Social , Axel Honneth describes the Gyorgy Lukacs's analysis of the fragmentation caused by capitalist society and the romantic reaction. There is, for starters, the fragmentation of the human being himself, induced by the capitalist separation of the worker from…
In his little book, Alone Again , Zygmunt Bauman summarizes his characteristic themes: We live in a liquid world, nothing permanent, nothing solid, nothing predictable. Typically pungent, Bauman points to “the overall tendency to dismantle, deregulate and dissipate the once solid and relatively lasting frames in which the concerns and…
Jeremiah 46 is an oracle against Egypt, which, like Judah, is threatened by the advancing forces of Babylon. In the space of four verses (20-23), Jeremiah runs through a dizzying series of metaphors. Egypt is a pretty heifer (v. 20), and Nebuchadnezzar's army is a “horsefly” that is going to…
The late Jock Young observes in his Vertigo of Late Modernity that our period is characterized by “a combination of factors, some long existing yet unique in their combination, others pre-existent yet transformed in the present period. The impact revolves around three axes, the disembeddedness of everyday life, the awareness…
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