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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As is well known from Confessions , Faustus played a crucial role in Augustine’s formation. As a young Manichean Auditor and devotee of astrology, Augustine puzzled over philosophical and quasi-scientific conundrums that he wanted to pose to a Manichean master. When Bishop Faustus visited Carthage, Augustine found him affable, humble,…
Though Augustine had the arsenal of the contra Iudaeos tradition at hand in responding to Faustus, he had become dissatisfied with it. After his debate with Fortunatus the Manichean, Augustine had embarked on a deep study of Paul and Genesis and came to recognize the weaknesses of this tradition, whose…
When Augustine turns to the typology of unclean foods in his reply to Faustus, he introduces a linguistic analogy that lays a foundation for the later arguments. Paul’s claim that all things are clean (1 Timothy 4:4) does not contradict the Old Testament, since Paul is talking about the nature…
Revelation 12-14 roughly follows the sequence of the first half of the week of creation. The overall movement is from heaven to sea to earth. Genesis 1 begins with light, then the separation of waters above and below, the formation of sea and land. We can be more specific. Land…
In The Dome of Eden , Stephen Webb wonders what might have happened if J. Gresham Machen, Princeton theologian and founder of Westminster Theological Seminary, had been at the Scopes trial. In Webb's account, Machen's main concern was to challenge the naturalistic presumptions of Darwinism: “Machen never rejected the basic…
In Purity Rabbinic Judaism (46), Jacob Neusner comments on the role of liquidity in the purity system: “Dry inanimate objects or food are not susceptible to uncleanness. What is wet is susceptible. So liquids activate the system.” A dead animal on a pile of grain contaminates only the grain that…
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