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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“Let him give his cheek to the smiter, let him be filled with reproach” (Lamentations 3:30). In context, Jeremiah is speaking of afflicted Israel, which he himself embodies as the prophet. “I have hope in Him,” Jeremiah writes (v. 24) and then turns to a meditation on the value of…
Lamentations 3:43-44 are set in parallel: A. You covered yourself with anger and pursued us B. You have slain and not spared A’. You have covered yourself with a cloud B’. So that no prayer can pass through. Both A sections speak of Yahweh hiding Himself behind a veil -…
College costs keep rising, but Kathleen Parker argues that the more serious problem is that students are no longer getting “much bang for their buck.” Parker sites a study from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni that criticizes colleges for “an increasing lack of academic rigor, grade inflation, high…
Back in 1934, Walter Dill Scott, president of Northwestern, already anticipated distance education : “The university of twenty-five years from now will be a different looking place, says President Scott of Northwestern. Instead of concentrating faculty and students around a campus, they will ‘commute’ by air, and the university will…
In his 1888 treatise on Christian Charity in the Ancient Church (7-9), Gerhard Uhlhorn contrasts pagan liberality with Christian charity. He acknowledges that pagan liberality was considerable, but that did not make it identical to the Christian virtue. “Liberality is the heathen virtue which corresponds to the compassionate love, the…
In a sermon on “Catholic Unity,” delivered in 1844, John Williamson Nevin announced the end of “Protestantism”—of the knee-jerk anti-Catholicism that, he said, did as much damage to the Reformation as the errors it opposed. “It is not enough now,” he declared, “simply to cry out against popery and puseyism,…
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