Author Archives
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Christians, Don’t Ignore How Weird the Book of Jude Is
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Early Christians Debated How to Interpret Genesis, Too
For many folks with a little exposure to church history, this is actually old news. Discussions of how to interpret the early chapters of Genesis are as old as Christianity. But since I’ve been reading through the major theologians of… Read More ›
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The Earliest Church Fathers on Election and Predestination (Part Two: Apostolic Fathers)
Christians have long wrestled with the subject of how God’s plans and actions in salvation interact with human responsibility and choice. And it is common for proponents of any theological system to appeal to the writings of theologians from the… Read More ›
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The Earliest Church Fathers’ Views on Election and Predestination (Part One: Clement of Rome)
One topic that’s of perennial interest to Christians is the question of how God’s role in saving people intersects with human choice. How does God’s sovereignty (or, more accurately, his providence) relate to human responsibility? The question arises because the… Read More ›
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The Apocryphal Book of Sirach and its Influence on Early Christianity
One of the apocryphal books I think is particularly interesting is the book called “The Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach.” It has also gone by a couple of other names, such as simply Sirach, Ben Sira, or Ecclesiasticus. It is… Read More ›
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The Apocrypha in a Nutshell
Recently I’ve been working my way through the Apocrypha. If you aren’t familiar with these, they are a collection of Jewish writings composed during the time between the Old and New Testaments (400 BC to the first century AD). The… Read More ›
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What Did Worship Look Like in the Early Church?
In my recent deep-dive back into church history, one of the things I’ve been most interested in is learning more about what early Christian worship looked like. There’s certainly a lot we can learn simply from reading the New Testament…. Read More ›
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The Earliest Church Handbook: The Didache
In this new video post, I’m giving a quick introduction to what is likely the oldest church handbook in history, The Didache (aka the “Teaching” or “Instruction”). This short, ancient text gives us a fascinating window into the everyday practices… Read More ›
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Getting to Know the Earliest Church Fathers
The history of Christianity is long and complex, but as I’ve written previously, there are a ton of reasons why it’s worth getting to know a little more about. Learning how the earliest Christians understood and lived out their faith… Read More ›
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Book Review: The Openness of God
Open theism is a topic that tends to rustle a lot of feathers, especially in some conservative/fundamentalist camps where the view often gets immediately labeled as unorthodox or even blasphemous. When I was in seminary, it was always quickly dismissed… Read More ›
Theology Pathfinder 