Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The doctrine of justification is precious among Protestants. And it should be. The fact that God has declared our sins forgiven and that we have a righteous standing in the sight of God united to Christ is comforting and brings great joy. Unfortunately, the biblical teaching on justification is, many…
The Old Testament priests were given a number of seemingly disparate duties. As everyone knows, the priests led the sacrificial worship of Israel; only the priests could sprinkle blood on the altar or within the tabernacle, and only they could approach the altar to turn sacrificial animals into smoke. But…
M issional ecclesiology is all the rage these days, but for many being “missional” means downplaying or even eliminating concern for the “internal” life of the church, particularly its liturgical life. Missional and liturgical, mission and communio , are locked in zero-sum combat. That cannot be right. The liturgy is…
An old friend of mine, now passed into Heaven, started to say this in relationship to his sometimes troubled family, in the last quarter of his life, "I just had to take responsibility for the whole thing..." That was the seed for a new reading of the Gospel for me,…
She departed the port, dressed in her best ceremonial regalia, with tassels and flags fluttering from her mast and rigging. She stood tall, robed in mist, crowned in white, and backlit by the rising sun. There she sat, shimmering and spotless; with a perfect ragtop, and a full tank of…
John the Baptist is presented in the gospels as the fulfillment of the Old Testament promise that God would send His messenger to prepare the way for the coming of the glory of the Lord (Is. 40), and the promise to send Elijah before Him to turn the people to…
Showing page 103 of 309
Showing page 7 of 43
Potter again: “Not all gods stayed at home. In the centuries after Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia, eastern peoples appear to have been drawn west in greater numbers, possibly because new centers of power such as Alexandria and Pergamon made the Aegean lands far more important than they had…
According to David S. Potter’s superb The Roman Empire at Bay: AD 180-395 (Routledge History of the Ancient World) , there was no such thing as Roman grand strategy. In part this was a limitation of cartographical technology: “Roman surveyors had the ability to draw very detailed maps of small…
Job 2:7: So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD, and struck Job with painful boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. Job is a king. He is the greatest of the men of the east; later he says that he delivers…
After Jesus finished dictating the letters to the seven churches, the Apostle John looked up and saw a “door standing open in heaven” and heard a trumpet voice call out, “Come up here.” Since Adam was expelled from the garden, humanity had longed to return. Century after century, no one…
It’s hard to stop once you get a good ceremony going, Mary Beard shows in her 2007 The Roman Triumph . She notes that the last actual Roman triumph took place sometime between the fourth and sixth century but that didn’t stop imitators: “Renaissance princelings launched hundreds of triumphal celebrations.…
Thomas Mathews ( The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton Paperbacks) ) claims that since the work of Kantorowicz, Andreas Alfoldi, and Andre Grabar, interpretations of early Christian art have been dominated by the “emperor mystique.” As summarized by Grabar, the theory is that the history…
Showing page 1372 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
