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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George Buchanan suggests a connection between Jewish asceticism and the expansion of purity concerns following the destruction of Solomon’s temple: “After the temple was burned in 586 . . . there was no longer a sacred place where the Lord could dwell in the land, undefiled. At that time celibacy…
On both the cover and the title page, a recent book on Jeremiah typology in Matthew is subtitled “The Rejected Profit Motif in the Matthaean Redaction.”
Augustine’s City of God created the Christian West because it enabled believers to think about a future of Christianity that did not depend on the persistence of Rome. Augustine relativized the story of Rome to the story of the City of God. How did he do that? Jesus taught him.…
In a 1997 article in NTS , Christopher Smith defends the five-discourse structure of Matthew against narrative critics who focus attention on the plot of Matthew. The problem with narrative approaches, Powell argues, is that as story Matthew doesn’t always work all that well: “it is a rather dull [story]…
Oscar JF Seitz has an interesting article in a 1960 issue of JBL . He connects the stones in the Jordan in Josh 4 with the stones that Jacob erects in Gen 28, which form the “House of God” in contrast to the false house of Babel. Bringing this into…
George Wesley Buchanan notes that ancient Jewish writings pay comparatively attention to Joshua. But, “For the church fathers, Joshua was very important - much more important than Moses. It was Joshua who led the army while Moses stood on the mountain and held up his hands. Joshua succeeded in leading…
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