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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Milbank ( Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People ) points out that the Enlightenment was not simple one thing: “it can bedivided into (a) a Christian and sometimes post -Christian Ciceronian Stoicreaction against the voluntarism of ‘modern Christian’ thought;(b) a perpetuation of Reformation…
Milbank’s Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People presupposes that there is a homology between metaphysics and politics. He identifies four assumptions of modern philosophy: “(1) the univocity rather than analogy of being; ( 2) knowledgeby representation rather than identity; ( 3 ) the…
Richard Beck ( The Slavery of Death ) quotes some impressive passages from Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death . They’reworthy of re-quoting. “This is what society is and always has been: asymbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customsand rules for behavior, designed to serve as a…
Observing that Christians today “sing songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented,” Walter Bruggemann suggests that the church is in a state of denial: “The church is less an evangelical defiance guided by faith, and must more a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want…
I review Richard Beck’s stimulating The Slavery of Death at the Trinity House site.
Jeremiah’s message to Judah is that the Lord has given the earth into hands of his “servant,” Nebuchadnezzar: “I have given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, My servant, and I have given him also the wild animals of the field to serve him” (27:6).…
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