Hebrews 1229
As our God is Consuming Fire, then what does He consume In the Lake of Fire into which all unbelievers will be cast, God's Fire does not consume unbelievers to total destruction so that they cease to exist. This is because a resurrected body is an immortal body, which is not affected by physical fire. The only thing that God consumes is their wickedness and unbelief. It is clear that the Lake of Fire represents both God's physical and spiritual cleansing on the Great White Throne Judgement Day....
The black body sex sexuality and sexual orientation
The black political subject is an embodied subject. Since the days of the transatlantic slave trade, the bodies of African and African-descended women and men have been sites of political, economic, and sexual desire. European and European American representative esthetics further scaled these black bodies as primitive, lascivious, repugnant. This evaluation was at once religious and moral. It reflected white Western Christianity's ambivalence toward the body, sex, and sexuality. Yet Stuart...
The Collapse of the Visigothic State and the Islamic Conquest
The Visigothic state which the Muslims found such an easy victim was an ethnically stratified society, with a fragmented political structure, a depressed and unbalanced rural economy, and a town life which was rudimentary at best. These Goths who also called themselves Thervings, or 28 People of the Woods were a herding people who, entering the peninsula in the early sixth century, tended to settle in areas ecologically suited to their traditional economic pursuits. Thus the greatest...
Points Of Contact And The Christian Use Of Hindu Concepts
S. K. Datta 1878-1942 and S. K. Rudra 1861-1925 in the North, and K. T. Paul 1876-1931 and V. S. Azariah 1874-1945 in the South, in general terms, sharing some of the ideas of the missionary theologians mentioned above, presented Christ as a window to God and vision for humanity, as well as a source of inspiration to raise the moral consciousness of Indians.18 But they were divided on the question of the value and theological validity of the institutionalized church in India. The last two made...
Myth Magic Religion and Survival
Belief in myth and magic is as old as sentient humanity. Many scholars have argued that some form of mythmaking is as integral to being human'' as are sex and food. Yet, the market for myth most particularly the demand side of the market is nebulous and complex. Although the economic approach espoused here does not require a complete comprehension of the characteristics of particular myths or magic, it is important to understand some fundamentals in order to arrive at a conception of demand for...
Notes 1
Al-Farabi. 1985. Al-Farabi on the Perfect State. Abu Nasr af-Forabi's Mjbadt' Ara'Ahlal-Madina al-Fadila The principles of the Opinions of the Virtuous City . Edited and Translated by R.Walzer. Oxford. The Clarendon Press. --. 1969. Alfarabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. Translated by M.Mahdi. Ithaca, N.Y. --. 1964. Kitab al-Siyasa al-Madaniyya The Political Regime . Edited by F.Najjar. Beirut Imprimerie Catholique. Translated partially by F.Najjar. 1963. In Medieval Political Philosophy...
Confederal municipalism
Social ecologist John Clark writes 'If social ecology is an attempt to understand the dialectical movement of society within the context of a larger dialectic of society and nature, ecocommunitarianism is the project of creating a way of life consonant with that understanding.'47 Although 'confederal municipalism' is Bookchin's preferred term for his programme of anarchist politics, Clark's summary captures well the trajectory of Bookchin's political theory. Bookchin proposes a politics, a...
Existentialism
Another form of revolt against Hegel is the rejection of any attempt to discern a universal pattern in history, or to speak in general terms about the nature of human existence. Existentialism is a form of philosophy which attempts to examine human life as it is lived, in concrete detail, not in terms of abstract theorizing. Reacting against the apparent subordination of the individual to the Absolute Spirit, in Hegel, it makes the individual the centre of its investigations. Since it is in...
Word Survey
Since ancient Babylon, the tongues languages of the nations have been babbling. The pure language, HEBREW, was undisturbed because Shem and his clan settled apart from his brothers' clans, the Babylonians. The babbling nations of today have in excess of 2,600 languages. They will be purged of their blasphemous terms, and one day call upon the Name of hYhy. Zeph. 3 8,9 I have decided to assemble the nations, to gather the kingdoms, and to pour out my wrath on them all my fierce anger. The whole...
Sex women children marriage and the family
In that important realm of human life which embraces the relations between the sexes, the status of women and children, marriage, and the family, Christianity wrought significant modifications. Women were prominently and favourably mentioned in the cherished records of the life of Christ. While Paul would not allow them to speak in the meetings of the churches, he declared that in Christ Jesus there could be neither male nor female, and in the churches of the first generation women were...
Chapter 21 Assassinating 3 Assassins
The three infamous assassins are Law, Property and Religion. So says the official ritual of the 33 and last degree ritual of the Antient and Accepted Scottish Rite. The 33 degree Jewish Mason Paul Rosen wrote in 1888, Once Religion is dead, Law and Property will fall to our mercy, and we shall be able to regenerate society by founding on the corpses of the assassins of man, Masonic Religion, Masonic Law, and Masonic Property.1 And the Masons are doing this. This book shows the documentation of...
Measures by the Incumbent Firm to Raise Rivals Costs
In certain respects, the medieval Catholic Church's reaction to Protestant entry was analogous to the reaction of business firms to regulated competition or to the tendency of special interests to seek protective trade legislation. In such cases, incumbent firms seek to protect their market power by raising rivals' costs. In the sixteenth century the rivals were, on the one hand, the new Protestant sects Lutherans, Anglicans, Calvinists, etc. , and on the other, the new heretics from the...
D Practical Applications of the Sufficiency of Scripture
The doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture has several practical applications to our Christian lives. The following list is intended to be helpful but not exhaustive. 1. The sufficiency of Scripture should encourage us as we try to discover what God would have us to think about a particular doctrinal issue or to do in a particular situation . We should be encouraged that everything God wants to tell us about that question is to be found in Scripture. This does not mean that the Bible answers...
The eucharistic liturgy
The principal Ethiopian liturgy is the eucharistic Mass or qaddase, for the celebration of which two priests and at least three deacons are required, and which runs for several hours and is conducted mostly in Ge'ez with only the readings and nowadays certain portions of the liturgy in the vernacular. The first part of the Mass, which retains the form of the ancient Mass of the Catachumens, includes recitations from the Psalms, chanted prayers and usually four readings, from the Pauline...
Jezebel Seal
Another event which occurred at the time of Jezebel was when the prophet Elijah challenged the 450 prophets of Baal whom she had appointed. Elijah told the people If the Lord is God follow him but if Baal is God, follow him. And to show the people that the Lord was God he challenged the prophets of Baal to call upon Baal to reign down fire from heaven, but nothing happened when they prayed to Baal. Then Elijah prayed to God that the people would turn their hearts back to the Lord. God heard...
Exegeting The Building
At this point, you may be thinking to yourself, So what's the big deal Who cares if the first-century Christians did not have buildings Or if church buildings were patterned after pagan beliefs and practices Or if medieval Catholics based their architecture on pagan philosophy What has Consider this next sentence The social location of the church meeting expresses and influences the character of the church.'' If you assume that where the church gathers is simply a matter of convenience, you are...
The Apocalypse and Armageddon
We may speak of the Apocalypse in terms of a radical leap in human evolution on psychic and spiritual levels, and perhaps even in terms of a radical leap in material development and evolution. According to Sophian teachings, what this evolution actually represents is an acceleration in the consciousness of humanity, sparked by an influx of supernal light and the corresponding activation of a fiery intelligence the incarnation of the light-bearer in humanity. The aim of this acceleration of...
Romans 656
5 For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, 6 knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no It is extremely important to understand what Apostle Paul is saying in these verses. He says that believers are united together in the likeness of the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul says that we should know that our 'old man'...
The Steeple
Ever since the inhabitants of Babel erected a tower to reach to the heavens, civilizations have followed suit by building structures with pointed tops.'' The Babylonians and Egyptians built obelisks and pyramids that reflected their belief that they were progressing toward immortality. When Greek philosophy and culture came along, the direction of architecture changed from upward and vertical to downward and horizontal. All of this suggested the Greek belief in democracy, human equality, and...
Further Christological controversies Apollinaris Nestorius Cyril
The general acceptance in the Catholic Church of what came to be called the Ni-cene Creed did not bring peace. That creed had been concerned primarily with the Trinity and with the relations within the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There remained the problem of the relation of the divine and the human in Jesus Christ. Here was to be the storm centre of a controversy which was to continue into the seventh century. It was to issue in divisions some of which persist into the present....
Bast1aan W1elunga
This self-critical approach implies on the other side an affirmation of the liberative thrust of biblical faith in such a way that struggles for the transformation of society can be fought in solidarity with non-Christians, Groups like the Christian Workers' Fellowship and the Devasarana Collective Farm in Sri Lanka have developed forms of celebration and dialogue in which different religious traditions which matter to people are articulated side by side in such a way that people do not feel...
Incest
Moses ordered the priests that They shall not take a wife that is a whore, or profane for he is holy unto his God. Leviticus 21 7 The laws against incest are most vehement The nakedness of thy mother, shalt thou not uncover she is thy mother Leviticus 18 7 And in the Talmud the Pharisee sages reverse these Biblical injunctions If a woman sported lewdly with her young son, a minor and he committed the first stage of cohabitation with her Beth Shammai say, he thereby renders her unfit to the...
Divine Revelation
Revelation or 'taking away the veil' indicates the disclosure, freely brought about by God's loving initiative, of what was previously unknown, the primary theme of the Second Vatican Council's Constitution on Divine Revelation of 1965, Dei Verbum 'the Word of God' . This classic document understands such disclosure to be primarily God's self-revelation, which invites the personal response of faith, and to be secondarily the communication of truths about God and human beings that would...
Ezekiel 2813
You were in Eden, the garden of God Every precious stone was your covering The sardius, topaz, and diamond, Beryl, onyx, and jasper, Sapphire, turquoise, and emerald with gold. The workmanship of your timbrels and pipes Was prepared for you on the day you were created. This verse is specifically speaking about Lucifer who became Satan, and it is not referring to the king of Tyre as misunderstood by some Christians. Ezekiel Chapter 28 begins by describing the king of Tyre, who was inspired by...
The Search for Truth
EOPLE sometimes think that it is odd, - - - - or even disingenuous, for a person to - j 4- be both a physicist and a priest. It in-_ fl _ duces in them the same sort of quiz- I zical surprise that would greet the claim to be a vegetarian butcher. Yet to someone like myself who is both a scientist and a Christian, it seems to be a natural and harmonious combination. The basic reason is simply that science and theology are both concerned with the search for truth. In consequence, they complement...
The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology
Connecting theology to a variety of disciplines and intellectual traditions, this companion provides an exciting sample of the current work of postmodern theologians. Many of the essays are ground-breaking, as the fields of theology and religious thought move forward into the next century. This is a valuable sequel to Ward's The Postmodern God If you think you know what postmodern theology is, or think you don't know, either way these remarkable essays will change your mind written by Jews,...
Archaeology and Genesis What Does the Record Show
century ago Charles Darwin advanced an alternative to the biblical account of creation. About the same time, Karl Marx made use of the theory of materialism, which stated that matter has always existed and doesn't need a Creator. This provided his followers with an alternative to belief in God. Then literary criticism focused its sights on the Bible and slowly began to attempt to tear it to pieces. Literary critics claimed that the Archaeologists excavating the site of ancient Sumer have...
Adams Punishment
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. Gen. 2 16,17. The penalty that God intended to threaten to Adam would certainly be found at the very promulgation of the consequences of his sin. But it is nowhere intimated in the account of the first human transgression that he had incurred endless torment. Adam...
Explanation And Scriptural Basis
The authority of Scripture means that all the words in Scripture are God's words in such a way that to disbelieve or disobey any word of Scripture is to disbelieve or disobey God. This definition may now be examined in its various parts. A. All the Words in Scripture Are God's Words 1. This Is What the Bible Claims for Itself. There are frequent claims in the Bible that all the words of Scripture are God's words as well as words that were written down by men .1 In the Old Testament, this is...
Amino Acids And Protein
PROTEIN NEEDED ALSO 6 Amino Acid Functions Now let's look at protein Putting protein and DNA together will not make them alive but, on the other hand, there can be no life without BOTH the protein and the DNA. Proteins would also have had to be made instantly, and in the right combination and quantity, at the very beginning. And do not forget the sequence Protein has to be in its proper sequence, just as DNA has to be in its correct sequential pattern. Proteins come in their own complicated...
Proof that He cannot be a Necessary Being in one respect and a contingent being
as much as it is a contingent being, would be connected in being with something else, and so it has a reason but in as much as it is a necessary being, it would have no connexions with anything else. In that case it would both have being and not have being and that is absurd. Demonstration that He has no material and receptive cause The receptive cause is the cause for the provision of the place in which a thing is received that is to say, the place prepared for the reception of being, or the...
Constantines Building Program
Following Helena's trip to Jerusalem in AD 327, Constantine began erecting the first church buildings throughout the Roman Empire, some at public expense.' In so doing, he followed the path of the pagans in constructing temples to honor God.' Interestingly, he named his church buildings after saints just as the pagans named their temples after gods. Constantine built his first church buildings upon the cemeteries where the Christians held meals for the dead saints.73 That is, he built them over...
The Sophian Vision of God
In the Kabbalah, there are three common terms for God that rek.' directly to the Sophian vision of God. These terms are Am, Am SoJ and Ain SoJ Or. Ain literally means no-thingness, Ain Sof means the infinite, and Ain Sof Or means the infinite light. These three terms are behind all Sophian dialogues about God and Godhead, which is to say the divine within creation and the divine transcendent of el ation. Because Ain or No-thingness is within all three of these terms, we must look into this term...
c The Beginning of the Gospel
The conclusion just reached is all the more striking in view of the fact that the Baptist is remembered in all strands of the Gospel tradition as 'the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ' Mark 1.1 . Mark is most explicit 1.2-8 makes it clear that it is John who marks or even constitutes that 'beginning' just as, later, John's martyr-like death prefigures that of Jesus 6.14-29 . But the fact that Q, by general consent, begins with the preaching of John Matt. 17 carries the same...
Descartes Foundationalism And Modern Philosophy
The centrality of epistemology in modern philosophy is clearly due to Descartes. He himself tells us he is seeking to start from the foundations in order to build a firm and lasting structure in the sciences. Whatever the precise order of priorities in his mind, he certainly had two key objectives. One was to free scientific enquiry, once and for all, from the criticisms of Pyrrhonian scepticism, recently fashionable through the rediscovery of the writings of Sextus Empiricus Descartes 1966...
Sacrificial Love
Any heroic story or romance has a hero a character who exemplifies certain characteristics that will endear him her to the reader or audience and set him her apart as a person of value and respect. Tolkien saw his mother die sacrificing her life for her children and passing on the Catholic Faith to them. He was raised by Catholic Priests where penance, fasting, prayer, abstinence and self control were all taught and practiced in love for Jesus Christ. He understood heroic sacrifice involved in...
Prophetic and Revivalist Premillennial Adventism
It is not coincidental that Christian Zionist and millennialist speculation have converged toward the end of each century, especially since the 1590's when the first printed literature dealing with millenarian speculations and the restoration of the Jews first appeared.61 The predominance of military and apocalyptic terminology in the titles of popular books written by Christian Zionists since the 1980's would suggest a similar connection in this century also.62 Andrew Walker has described this...
Characteristics
We need to ask what is Islamic about Islamic theology Most evidently, it is Islamic to the extent that it may be traced back in some way to the Prophet Muhammad and his distinctive vision of the One God. According to his scripture, he was sent ''as a mercy to the worlds'' Qur'an 21 107 , and one aspect of that mercy, as Muhammad Abdel Haleem suggests in chapter 1, was that he mapped out a religious path of great simplicity. This was to be the simplicity of an Abrahamic and ''primordial''...
The medieval period
The history of the Ethiopian Church in the years following the waning of Aksum's political power in the later sixth century is little known. The rise of Islam, and loss of Ethiopian control of the Red Sea coast, as well as economic factors all led the Christian kingdom to move its focus progressively further south into the Ethiopian highlands. Ethiopia's relations with the nascent power of Islam are supposed by Arab historians to have been excellent. The Ethiopian kingdom was placed in Muslim...
The Four Gospels Jesus Prophet and Embodiment of the Kingdom of God
According to Mark's Gospel, Jesus of Nazareth preached the reign of God and thus oriented his heaven to that alternative horizon which Jewish eschatologi-cal hopes had kept in view as is evident from texts like 4Q 521 from the Dead Sea Scrolls see Vermes 1995 244 . Present political and social arrangements were not the norm, therefore. The imminent arrival of the messianic age heralded new priorities and broadened horizons Luke 4 16 Matt. 11 2 ff. . Political authority in Jerusalem was in fact...
Astrology and MoonWorship
Astrology the belief that the Sun, planets and star-groups constellations possess an influence over human destiny and the attempt to discover and to predict the nature of such influence. There are two main schools of interpretation one based on the day of the year on which the individual was born, and classifying him by one of the twelve signs of the zodiac the other, deriving its conclusions from the exact time of day at which the birth took place and making use of the horoscope, or the study...
Art and Idolatry in the Early ThirdCentury Christian Writings
Because Tertulliar, ca, 200 was deeply concerned about the problem of Christians being ensnared in a polytheistic culture, his treatise On Idolatry extends the definition of idolatry far beyond anything to do specifically with pictorial art. For Tertullian, idolatrous practices include preoccupation with the way one dresses, the foods one eats, or the pursuit of sexual pleasures or material wealth all things that humans mistakenly lake for having intrinsic value and that they honor more than...
John The Baptist
THE BAPTISM OF JESUS IS RECORDED IN MATTHEW 3 13-17 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. And John tried to prevent Him, saying, I need to be baptized by You, and are You coming to me But Jesus answered and said to him, Permit it to be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness. Then he allowed Him. When He had been baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water and behold, the heavens were opened to Him, and He saw the Spirit of...
Romans 914
1 I tell the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit, 2 that I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen according to the flesh, 4 who are Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises. Paul says that he would have been willing to swap places with his fellow...
The Roman Popes Damasus and Praetextatus
Damasus was worldly, wealthy, and resolute in his efforts to strengthen the power of his papacy and the dominance of the Roman church. The rival Ursinians were reported to have called him a matronarum auriscalpius, an ear-scratcher of matrons, for his ability to persuade wealthy women to donate their worldly goods to the church. An edict of Valentinian I that forbade the practice of visiting wealthy matrons, widows, and orphans for the purpose of soliciting donations for the church may have...
The papacy on the periphery
An aspect of papal power in the High Middle Ages which is often overlooked involves the interactions between Rome and such 'fringe' regions as Iberia, Ireland, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. Popes of the eleventh century were acutely aware of the importance of cultivating relationships with the expanding periphery. Politically, it was advantageous to encircle the often troublesome realms of Germany and France with sympathetic churches on their borders. Such a policy also continued a...
Arguments in Favour of the Social Analogy
Of the writers considered so far in this chapter, Williams, Geach, Swinburne, MacKinnon and Brown all favour the social analogy over the psychological analogy for very obvious reasons. The psychological analogy, despite its venerable pedigree in Augustine and much western theology, contains a fundamental weakness. It seeks a model or image of the triune life of the God of the Christians in the distinctions and relations between, say, memory, understanding and will in an individual human mind....
That there Is a Necessary Being
Whatever has being must either have a reason for its being, or have no reason for it. If it has a reason, then it is contingent, equally before it comes into being if we make this mental hypothesis and when it is in the state of being for in the case of a thing whose being is contingent the mere fact of its entering upon being does not remove from it the contingent nature of its being. If on the other hand it has no reason for its being in any way whatsoever, then it is necessary in its being....
Theo Aw Van Der Louw
The Greek Joshua has attracted some of the best minds during the past century.1 Since scholars seek challenges, their studies often deal either with the book as a whole, its most difficult passages, or its most bewildering features. But how can we avoid the circular reasoning that easily clings to such ambitious approaches For this article, I therefore took the opposite route, hoping that the discussion of some omissions in a relatively easy chapter Joshua 2 would yield clues for the more...
Pilgrimages
In 1869 the Suez Canal was opened, coincidentally the same year Thomas Cook led his first tour group to Jerusalem, made up of 16 ladies, 33 gentlemen, and two assistants. By the end of the 19th Century, his company had arranged for 12,000 pilgrims to visit the Holy Land. It is not an exaggeration to say that Thomas Cook probably did more than any other person to facilitate and shape evangelical contact with the Holy Land. His reputation as an organiser of pilgrimages grew after he was invited...