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
One of the most amusing contributions to the early modern debate on the origins of language came from Francis Mercury van Helmont. Like many others, he insisted that Noah spoke Hebrew, but his way of defending and explication that was uniquely his own. In his 1667 Very Short delination of…
You wouldn’t know as you slogged through his impenetrable prose, but Husserl’s turn to phenomenology was, Jonathan Ree argues, a “belated return to plain healthy common sense” ( I See A Voice , 343). All knowledge comes initially through the senses, the scholastics had said, and early modern philosophers had…
Last week at Slate , Mike Pesca assured us that, Montgomery Burns notwithstanding, steeplers aren’t necessarily evil. Steepling is what you do when you form a tent with your fingers. Touching fingers in succession while steepling is optional. Pesca cites the Definitive Book of Body Language by Barbara and Allan…
Historically, “aesthetics” has had an accidental relationship to art. Aesthetics, from aesthesis , referred to perception through senses. In this sense, an “aesthetic” theory of art is a theory with a particular focus on the sensory experience of art. If we put aside the peculiar theory of the senses embodied…
John is so subtle that we nearly miss it. Jesus says, “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (John 9:4), implying that at some time he might not be in the world. Then he heals a blind man with clay and tells him to…
Belief in God is natural, argues Justin Barrett in Born Believers . His is not a theological or philosophical argument about natural knowledge, but a conclusion from interviews, surveys, and other psycho-sociological evidence. Which makes atheism rather an anomaly, Barrett things, and a comparatively rare one. After surveying the factors…
Showing page 647 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
