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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For reasons that I’ll detail in a subsequent post, I’m a considerable fan of Nicholas of Cusa. I was unhappy to come across this from William Cavanaugh: “The origin of the modern concept of religion can be seen clearly in the thought of two fifteenth-century Christian Platonist thinkers, Nicholas of…
Michael Budde writes, “Like the Rolling Stones and other major concert acts, the Catholic Church has now taken on corporate sponsorship to underwrite the world tours of its major performer, Pope John Paul II. To finance his 1998 visit to Mexico city, the Archdiocese of Mexico City entered into sponsorship…
The story of 2 Kings 1 is undoubtedly meant humorously. Ahaziah falls ill and sends messengers off to consult with Baal-zebub, baal of the flies. On the way, his messengers meet a “baal of hair,” Elijah - right title, wrong god. Yahweh will not allow Ahaziah’s men ever to get…
Here are some highlights of Marjorie Garber?s essay on Richard III in Shakespeare After All . 1) Garber suggests that Richard is the ?first fully realized and psychologically conceived character?Ein Shakespeare?s plays. Richard?s character is fully realize because he is complex, protean, chameleon and Machiavellian (cf. 3 Henry VI 3.2.191-193).…
A further note from Haight: One of the criticisms he lodges against Aquinas and scholasticism is that it tended to treat grace and conversion in a mechanistic fashion: “This is a fundamental distortion of the dynamics of grace when it is seen contrasted with a personalist description, and it has…
Underlying different doctrines of justification, and inseparable from them, are different notions of grace. The historical issues have been ably summarized by Roger Haight in his 1979 book, The Experience and Language of Grace. Haight points out that doctrines of grace have differed partly because the reality of grace is…
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