What I do affects who I am and what I believe, especially when it is something I do over and over. It is my habits, my repeated actions, that influence how I see the world and who I am.
At the end of time, when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride forth, bringing famine, pestilence, war and death upon mankind, God will send forth His holy ones to match them and to overcome them.
Things will settle out in this crisis and competing authorities will finally converge on a consensus. But our problem with the hostile wilderness will remain.
The argument against iconography breaks down because those who reject icons do not understand what idolatrous images were actually used for. They were not merely religious art. They are a kind of religious technology designed to trap and control a god.
When the gospel began to be preached, forgiveness from God was a revelation, something new that was outside of anyone’s expectation of how a god should operate.
Sexual immorality is a kind of evil that introduces corruption into a person and his community in a way that is deep and damaging like almost nothing else is.
If we read the parable of the Publican and Pharisee merely as a morality tale about being humble rather than prideful, we miss how it is placed in the larger narrative of the Scripture and all the revelation of God.