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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A comment from W.H. Auden’s Dyer’s Hand rings true: “All those who success in life depends neither upon a job which satisfies some specific and unchanging social need, like a farmer’s, nor, like a surgeon’s, upon some craft which he can be taught by others and improve by practice, but…
David Brondos has an important article on Luther’s notion of justification in the Winter 2004 issue of Pro Ecclesia . Brondos distinguishes between analytic conceptions of justification (that justification is the work of Christ by which one becomes righteous) from synthetic views (that justification is a declaration of the sinner’s…
My Body Given For You, Luke 22:1-62 INTRODUCTION Jesus has been in Jerusalem making a big scene in the temple ?Edriving out the money changers, teaching as if it were His own house, debating with the scribes and chief priests. The Jewish leaders, already angry with Jesus, are further provoked…
Here are a few thoughts on the Auburn Avenue controversy, snipped from an intervention I made on a discussion list. The specific issue in question is Steve Wilkins’s claim that all who are baptized receive “every spiritual blessing in Christ.” First, an exegetical point: Who is Paul addressing when he…
Cartoons have always been a bit subversive: We root for the rabbit against the hunter, and the carnivalesque characters are always preferable to the law-and-order types that they mock. The underdog roadrunner always triumphs over the predatory coyote. And so on. Some recent cartoons continue to be quite clever, especially…
Any idea of cooperation with grace rests on a nature/grace dualism. To say that I cooperate with grace implies that I have some sort of independent power of action that is not always already the product of grace. That is, it depends on the assumption that there is some independent…
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