Peter denies Jesus three times on the night of Jesus’ arrest and trial. The only other time the verb “deny” is used in the NT, it’s used of “self-denial,” which is immediately connected to “taking up the cross.” There are thus two options: Deny . . . . Continue Reading »
Josh Gibbs writes: “While it might be anachronistic to read it this way (modern Christianity has likely blown the idea of the ‘sword of the Spirit’ way out of proportion), it seems best to me that we understand two entirely different, separate swords in . . . . Continue Reading »
Ezekiel is the only OT writer to promise a “new heart” to Israel (18:31; 36:26). He promises hearts of flesh in place of hearts of stone. What has given the people of Judah hearts of flesh in the first place? Ezekiel 14:1-7 gives an answer: They have set (stone - gold and . . . . Continue Reading »
Near the end of his recent Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults , Christian Smith summarizes the argument of a 1995 article by N. Jay Demerath of the University of Massachusetts. Demerath writes, that the widely reported decline of liberal Protestantism . . . . Continue Reading »
Athanasius appeals to the baptismal formula to show that the Son must be Creator: If he re-creates in baptism along with the Father, He must have created from the beginning. But this raises the question, Is the Father insufficient in Himself? Athanasius, strikingly, does not answer by . . . . Continue Reading »
Jesus says, “Take up your cross and follow Me,” which is to say, “Be willing to die with me.” Instead the disciples flee. But it gets worse. The word “sword” is used six times in Matthew 26:47-56, three times in verse 52 alone. (Otherwise, . . . . Continue Reading »
John Milbank throws down a challenging gauntlet to Protestants in the Afterword to The Radical Orthodoxy Reader . He explains Radical Orthodoxy as a continuation of the attack on extrinicism launched by the nouvelle theologie . Barth, he argues following the critiques of Przywara and . . . . Continue Reading »
Bonhoeffer shows how love of God and love for His creation can be reconciled by using a musical analogy: “God wants us to love him eternally with our whole hearts - not in such a way as to injure or weaken our earthly love, but to provide a kind of cantus firmus to which the other melodies of . . . . Continue Reading »
David Cunningham writes, “What was one a ‘kiss of peace,’ uniting bodies in an almost frighteningly intimate way, now often consists only of a tentative handshake and a mumbled greeting. Of course, this does still provide an opportunity to meet the other face to face, body . . . . Continue Reading »
In his Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (1989), Thomas Wiedemann remarks on the difference between pagan and Christian conceptions of infant death: “For the pagan, premature death was a disaster because the child’s life was wasted; for Augustine, a child who died prematurely . . . . Continue Reading »
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