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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Isaiah 11:9: The earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. I finished Sunday School earlier today, where I gave an overview of the last chapters of Revelation. On Tuesday, my final graduate and undergraduate classes will both be on Revelation. Last…
Things are changing and all the changes will be great blessings so long as you don’t let the demands of the moment distract you from being the church. Look at this new phase as a fresh opportunity to live up to our name – Trinity Reformed Church. God is Love,…
In an essay on marriage and the construction of reality , Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner observe how the modern “crystallization” of the public/private divide has affected the pursuit of identity and reputation: “It would . . . seem that large numbers of people i our society are quite content…
Thomas ( ST III, 60, 1) is interestingly careful in the way he deals with the notion that sacraments are causes. He asks whether sacraments are signs, and his first objection is grammatical: Sacramentum comes from sacrando , which means “sacring,” and, on analogy with medicando , it refers to…
Thomas asks ( ST III, 60, 5) whether the sensible thing of the sacraments is a “determinate” something. Do we have to use specific things, or may we substitute at will? His answer is that sacramental elements are determinate, and his reasoning has to do with the nature of sacramental…
In the current issue of The Weekly Standard , Jon A. Shields gives a searing summary of the trial of Kermit Gosnell. He admits, “the liberal position on killing abortion survivors makes a bizarre kind of moral sense,” and then adds: “After all, what is the moral difference between killing…
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