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Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Art

The Second Word V: On Images and Art, Part 3

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…

by James B. JordanSeptember 4, 1998
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Biblical Horizons

Patriarchal Dominion

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…

by James B. JordanAugust 4, 1998
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Biblical Horizons

The Case Against Western Civilization, Part 6

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…

by James B. JordanAugust 4, 1998
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Biblical Studies

Re-creation in the Ascension Offering

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…

by James B. JordanJuly 4, 1998
Biblical Horizons

The Framework Hypothesis: A Gnostic Heresy

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…

by James B. JordanJuly 4, 1998
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Art

The Second Word V: On Images and Art, Part 2

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…

by James B. JordanJuly 4, 1998

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Wedding Sermon

Much of the following wedding sermon was inspired by Eugene Peterson’s recent Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places . I read from the first chapter of John’s First Epistle. What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at…

August 7, 2005

Bones

Bones are the last part of a person to decay, and so in Scripture they are often used to designate the person in a state of death or a continuing existence after death (cf. Joseph’s bones). The bones of a nation are the remnant that are left after a nation’s…

August 3, 2005

Christ Plays

Eugene Peterson’s latest book, the first of a five-volume spiritual theology, takes its title from some lovely lines of Gerald Manley Hopkins: Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

August 3, 2005

Domesticity

In an essay in What’s Wrong With the World , Chesterton challenges the complaint that home-making is narrow and demeaning for women. On the contrary: “woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and…

August 3, 2005
Science

Godel’s theorem

Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem - the claim that every formal system of mathematics contains an undecidable formula and that a system’s consistency cannot be proven within the system - has been hailed as the mathematical equivalent of relativity and quantum mechanics, evidence, in the words of William Barrett, that “Mathematicians…

August 2, 2005
Science

Godel’s theorem

Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem - the claim that every formal system of mathematics contains an undecidable formula and that a system’s consistency cannot be proven within the system - has been hailed as the mathematical equivalent of relativity and quantum mechanics, evidence, in the words of William Barrett, that “Mathematicians…

August 2, 2005

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