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…
Showing page 248 of 309
Showing page 1 of 43
Deuteronomy 7:13 gives a succinct summary of Yahweh’s promise to Israel. When Israel goes into the land, He will “love you and bless you and multiply you.” This triad appears to be a sequence: Yahweh loves, and therefore blesses; and blessing, as in the creation account, brings increase - He…
William Deresiewicz wants to preserve the stature of John Updike. In his TNR review of Adam Begley’s Updike , Deresiewicz contends that the current eclipse of Updike won’t last. For the moment, David Foster Wallace’s crack that Updike is a “penis with a thesaurus” will be the elite opinion, but…
Leonid Bershidsky isn’t impressed with the Apple Watch: “The Apple Watch isn’t a tech miracle. It requires a phone to work, creating an Occam’s-razor moment for the consumer: Do I need another device if I still have to carry my phone around with me everywhere? Samsung has overcome this by…
Neuroscientist Jeffrey Zacks says that filmmakers know a lot about how brains work, even if they couldn’t explain the science. After all, they’re able to get people to pay good money to watch light flickering on a screen, and they can get these people frightened, sad, jubilant in the space…
Fairy tales obviously have played an enormous role in folk culture over the centuries. Less well known perhaps is the role fairy tales have played in the intellectual life of the modern age, the age when we’ve given up belief in fairies. The collection compiled by the Brothers Grimm had…
Pastor Rich Lusk of Trinity Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, suggests that the “leaven of their Pharisees” isn’t simply their teaching, but their entire vision of the coming kingdom. For the Pharisees, as Marcus Borg pointed out, the kingdom could come only if Israel pursued holiness by means of separation. At the…
Showing page 532 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
