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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William Dembski's latest, Being As Communion , sets out a metaphysics of information, and argues for what he calls “informational realism.” Reality is information all the way down, but that information is real. It is reality. What is information? Dembski says it's “about realizing possibilities by ruling out others. Unless…
John's account of the resurrection fulfills the promise of his prologue (John 20). Here is the Word made flesh, dead and buried, now risen as new Adam, the “gardener,” with Mary Magdalene, a type of the new Eve. The Word who spoke the worlds into being speaks also after death,…
Elijah's life (1 Kings 17-19) tracks that of Moses. He confronts the Pharaoh-like King Ahab, then flees from the land, as Moses fled to Midian, where he is cared for by a widow. God provides miraculously for the prophet and his host, but then her child dies. In the Moses…
Paul Griffiths's Decreation has some harrowing passages about sin. Like this one: “What will be left of me when I am no longer a sinner? That is a question fundamental to trembling before hell's presence in the devastation [i.e., the fallen world]. Such trembling, however, like all well-formed Christian responses,…
A wondrous passage from Donne: “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by…
Thomas considers acedia, “sloth,” as the opposite of delight. It is “sadness directed toward what ought to yield delight” (summary by Paul Griffiths, Decreation , 196). Paul Griffiths glosses: Acedia “is the mark of those sufficiently habituated to looking at nothing that when they look at something—and most especially at…
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