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Apostle Paul

Paul in Prison: Ephesus or Rome?

In the books of 1 and 2 Corinthians, Paul refers to hardships in his ministry in Asia, specifically Ephesus (1 Corinthians 4:9-13; 15:32; 2 Corinthians 1:8; 4:8-12; 6:4-5; 11:23-25). However, the multiple imprisonments Paul mentions are not fully reflected in Luke’s account of Paul’s ministry — Luke only records a…

by Ralph Allan SmithFebruary 15, 2022
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Epistemology

Vertical Living

After all these months pondering integration, I have come to the point of believing that the dynamic of integration just is the real at its heart. Everything that is real or comes to be real is a dynamo of integrative coherence. I also believe it is true that the real…

by Esther Lightcap MeekFebruary 1, 2022
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Books

Tom Holland and the Liberating Power of Christianity

Have you heard of Tom Holland? Not the young Tom Holland of Spiderman fame. No doubt you’ve heard of him. I’m referring to the middle age Oxford-trained historian who recently wrote Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind . (Both Hollands are British, so you’ll be forgiven for confusing them.)…

by Gerald HiestandJanuary 25, 2022
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Biblical Horizons

"Do This!"

This article was originally published in 1990. (The essay that follows concerns a rather touchy subject: how the Lord’s Supper is to be done. I am not writing to insult or offend, but to challenge. To that end I have not "held back" but have "gone ahead" and said what…

by James B. JordanJanuary 19, 2022
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American Culture

The Dominion Trap

This article was originally published in 1990. In Genesis One, God told Adam and Eve to "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on…

by James B. JordanJanuary 13, 2022
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Biblical Studies

Will Few Be Saved?

On several occasions the gospels record Jesus teaching that only a few will be saved (Matthew 7:14, Matthew 22:14, and Luke 13:23). Careful readers of Scripture should begin to wrestle with how these passages found in the gospels fit together with other passages that teach that many will be saved…

by Manny LucasJanuary 11, 2022

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Cities Ascending and Descending

The Bible ends with a vision of the descent of a jeweled bridal city Jerusalem descending from heaven. Before the city descends, though. a city ascends: Babylon is destroyed and her smoke rises forever and ever. God's city descends only after the city of man is sent up to God…

August 14, 2015

Anti-Labor, Anti-Catholic

David Sehat argues ( The Myth of American Religious Freedom ) that the American moral establishment was undermined by the labor movement: “By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the corporation had joined the family, the church, and the school as an institution perpetuating Christian moral authority” (189). This…

August 13, 2015

Myth and the Fragmentation of Humanity

Paganism, writes Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy ( Christian Future ), “is best understood . . . as primitive man's response to the fear of death.” That means not only personal death but also the death of those groups to which he is bound—family, race, country. The problem is that “all finite forms…

August 13, 2015

The End For Which God Made Us

“The patristic concept of theosis is the most precise and compendious possible evocation of the end for which God creates us,” writes Robert Jenson in a characteristically dense essay in The Catholicity of the Reformation . It doesn't imply that the Creator-creature distinction is somehow erased; that difference is “indeed…

August 13, 2015

What Cantwell Achieved

David Sehat ( The Myth of American Religious Freedom , 222-3) observes that Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940) was the first Supreme Court decision to incorporate the religion clause of the First Amendment to the States. In the case, Jehovah's Witnesses were denied a license to proselytize. The Court struck down…

August 12, 2015

Creating Genocide

Emmanuel Katongole ( A Future for Africa , 98-101) argues, as others have, that the racial division behind the Rwandan genocide was forged during Western colonization. “Before the colonial occupation of Rwanda,” he writes, “the Hutu and Tutsi were not ‘clearly distinct and rigidly separated ethnic groups.'” The distinction existed,…

August 12, 2015

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