Beauty has a hard time in confessional Protestant circles, and it’s easy to understand why. In our sex-saturated society, this powerful and elevating value has been exploited and degraded to the level of commercial property. Once ranked as the necessary companion to truth and goodness, it’s devolved into little more than the ultimate selling point […]
I have had several close friends convert to Orthodoxy over the years, and they’re always excited to talk about their transition. “Come and see,” said one friend, smiling. “The iconography, the vestments, the beauty!” It’s not just the visual engagement. There is also an ancient stimulation of the other senses—the smells, the chanting, all of […]
Should we take a hammer and chisel to the Jesus of the Bible and shape him into our own personal Jesus? Of course not! This does not, however, stop North Americans from getting out their toolbox. Obviously I’m not speaking literally, but the tendency of people to “rebrand” the Jesus of history into their own […]
A cursory comparison of the indices of any primary or secondary work on Eastern Orthodoxy and evangelicalism exposes an interesting contrast—in the Eastern Orthodox index, one will find such entries as chrismation, deification, energies of God, recapitulation, theosis, and the like, but notable absences will include original sin, grace, justification, sanctification, substitutionary atonement, and related […]
Every day brings another gruesome story of men, women, and children in the Middle East being persecuted for their faith in Christ. Churches are destroyed, families are pushed out of their homes and villages, individuals have their throats slit—and the entire world watches with horror. Western Christians regularly pray for our persecuted brothers and sisters […]
Why are people leaving Reformed churches for Eastern Orthodox churches? While there have always been some who have left Protestant churches to be received (chrismated) into Eastern Orthodoxy (EO), significant cultural differences have generally prevented it from being a significant draw to Protestant “searchers.” With the advent of a distinctly American flavor of EO found […]
I grew up attending an evangelical Bible church of the fundamentalist variety. While it was evident that the members of my childhood congregation genuinely loved God and were devoted disciples of the truth as they understood it, I wondered why the faith of my youth felt insulated, even emphatically isolated at times, from the rest […]
The medieval historian Steven Runciman once quipped, “Of all the roads that a historian may tread none passes through more difficult country than that of a religious historian.” If he’s correct, then the controversial terrain of Greek reformer, writer, and eventual patriarch Cyril Lucaris (1570–1638) is a most treacherous bog for us to enter. Yet […]
You could say that I have been around the theological block a few times. I’ve converted to and from a number of things. Baptized Catholic and raised Episcopalian, I ran through nondenominational groups in my teen years and then was off to the Reformation. I went through some philosophy degree programs and left the Reformation […]
The enduring influence of Christianity on many of its greatest critics is one of modern history’s paradoxes. In Damning Words: The Life and Religious Times of H. L. Mencken, D. G. Hart highlights this apparent incongruity in the life of the legendary American agnostic—from his childhood in the last decade of the nineteenth century to […]
If you hate church fellowship hour, evangelizing strangers, and youth group lock-ins, you might be a terrible Christian. Or maybe you’re just an introvert. Adam S. McHugh, a pastor and introvert, has written Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture to help churches figure out the difference. Many books have been […]
In Martin Luther and the Enduring Word of God, Robert Kolb places his readers in contact with a world where the interpretation and application of Scripture was more than a matter of personal religious conviction. The sixteenth-century Reformers sought to recover God’s speech in Scripture—speech that had been crowded out by opinions, traditions, and superstitions, […]
