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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Rereading the chapter on Derrida in Brian Ingraffia’s Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology (Cambridge, 1995), I realize just how much my understanding of Derrida was formed by reading this book several years ago. Ingraffia highlights (as I have done in a previous post, erroneously thinking I had come up with…
In his book on the “moral vision of the NT,” Richard Hays refers to homosexual acts as an “antisacrament” of rebellion against God, a visible (even ritual?) manifestation of a rejection of the Creator and His created order. This is a very profound way to describe the character of the…
Sermon notes for October 26: The Father’s Gifts to His Children, Luke 11:1-54 INTRODUCTION On His journey toward Jerusalem, Jesus meets the same range of responses that He met in Galilee. He is accused of being in league with the devil (v. 15) and criticized by the Pharisees (vv. 37-41),…
The remarkable Jody Bottum ?Epoet, poetry editor for First Things , and Books and Culture editor for The Weekly Standard ?Ehas made bioethics his bailiwick, having published several essays in The Weekly Standard in the past few years. He writes the lead editorial on the subject in the current issue,…
In her monograph on magic and the demonic in Luke-Acts (entitled The Demise of the Devil ), Susan Garrett offers some illuminating comments on Jesus’ declaration that He watched Satan fall from heaven like lightning (Luke 10:17-20): 1) She argues persuasively that Jesus is speaking prophetically of a future fall…
The same Weekly Standard review mentioned in a previous post gives a brief summary of the editorial introduction to Volume 21 of the Works of Jonathan Edwards , written by Sang Hyun Lee: “Lee claims that Edwards marks a stunning departure from the Western theological tradition by the way he…
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