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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“Follow the ways of your heart and what your eyes see; and know that on account of all these, God will bring you into judgment.” The last part of this is often taken as a warning about the limits of joy and pleasure-taking. Seow thinks otherwise: “Human beings are supposed…
Ecclesiastes 11:5 emphasizes the limitations of human knowledge by emphasizing that God works everything: “you do not know the works of God (ELOHIM) who does all (Y’SH ET-HAKOL).” There are two possible translations of the last relative clause: 1) “who does all.” If we go with this translation, we have…
I saw a man hoarding his treaures, building bigger barns and stuffing his safety deposit boxes and worrying over his portfolio. Disaster struck, and he lost everything because he had everything to lose. He didn’t even have three comforters. I saw a man throwing around his money with abandon, emptying…
I saw a man with a bag of seed. He looked at the sky to discern the weather, and decided tomorrow would be a better day to plant. The next day, he invented instruments to test the humidity and to predict the wind, and decided that tomorrow would be a…
As Jones presents it, the logic of repression of sexual desires is as follows: 1) The desires are most likely to be repressed are those that are socially disapproved, disapproved by the “herd.” 2) We unconsciously push back those disapproved desire. The imagery is hydraulic: Repressing disapproved desires creates pressure,…
Ernest Jones notes an essential contribution of modern psychology: “We are beginning to see man not as the smooth, self-acting agent he pretends to be, but as he really is, a creature only dimly conscious of the various influences that mould his thought and action, and blindly resisting with all…
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