Category: Church
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The Sarcophagus of Alexander the Great & the Risen Body of Christ.
I spent a couple of hours last week in the Istanbul Museum of Archeology and was able to view the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great. It is enourmous and ornate. Originally it was painted in bright colors, some of which can still be seen on the sides and along the top moulding. This wasnt the […]
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The Peace-makers: War, violence, and the response of the Church Fathers. Part 4
The insinuation of many evangelicals is that the martyr has no place in the 21st-century church; that the martyr is simply a fool without a gun whose life has been cut short for lack of firearms training. There seems to be no place in the modern church for the one who utterly refuses to kill, the one who believes that there are things far worse than death…
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The Peace-makers: War, violence, and the response of the Church Fathers. Part 3
The word pacifism is often confused with the idea of pacifying or letting the enemy have what they want. However, the actual meaning is found in the root Latin word pax (peace), and it means peace-making. According to Commodianus (250), the call of the Christian is to “make thyself a peace-maker to all men.”
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The Peace-makers: War, violence, and the response of the Church Fathers. Part 2
The Peace-makers: War, violence, and the response of the Church Fathers. Part 2 The inconvenient fact for Western Christians is that, for Tertullian and the church fathers of the first 3 centuries … “a Christian could not serve in the military because the Christian cannot bear the sword … Jesus is the full expression of God, and he has revealed God to be non-violent, choosing to go to the cross rather than to wield the sword … And if the church’s answer to evil is war, bloodshed, and violence, then our king is not unique, and our kingdom is just as “of this world” as any other.”
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The Peace-makers: Exploring war, violence, and the response of the Church Fathers. Part 1
The Same Way, or a New Way? The response to evil in the world is something that the church claims to possess above all other claims. The church claims that the cross of Christ is the answer to those prone to violence, those quick to use the threat of physical violence to coerce, and to […]
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How to Use a Commentary: 4 ways to get the most out of your daily study.
FYI: Skip to the bottom for my list of recommendations Reading a commentary while you study the scriptures is the best way to ensure that you are correctly interpreting the text. There is no shortage of people, even pastors, interpreting and teaching the Bible without any help from biblical scholars who have devoted their lives […]
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Evangelicalism’s Life or Death Moment
Euangelion. It is a simple word that means “good news”. It was, from the mouths of Jesus and his band of disciples, a message of hope. That God, through Jesus, is fixing everything that is broken and setting all things to rights again. Not through the power of earthly might, but by the cross. In […]
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My 4 Rules for Responding to Nasty Emails.
Every so often I receive an email written out of anger, hurt, or any one of the various emotions that cause people to lash out against others. Sometimes these emails are specifically written to inflict pain and shut down communication, while other times they are written to elicit a specific response from me. I’ve only […]
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Stones in your Garden.
A few years back my wife and I bought a fixer upper and we worked on house until it was exactly what we wanted it to be, on the inside that is. One day we decided that we would start working on the yard and it was entirely different territory to us. The yard had […]
Tommy Preson Phillips 