Church

The Public Reader in the Church

The role of the public reader in the earliest diasporan Church, how the language changed over time, and the new problems it created.

Evangelicals and Health Care Ethics

How health care ethics need to be ingrained in the fabric of the evangelical mindset.
Technology has introduced great breakthroughs on issues of life and death but has also naturally brought about new ethical issues that the traditional faith has not been prepared to engage in.
Most evangelicals are left with making life or death decisions, not on the basis of religious piety, but the insistence of economics or social convenience. They are game time decisions made in hospitals and doctors offices. These decisions are not considered the role of the church or faith. It is just what has to be done. Faith comes later.

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Lightfoot on the Problem Tongues of Corinth

John Lightfoot

A digitization of John Lightfoot’s Commentary on the tongues of Corinth.

John Lightfoot was a seventeenth-century English Churchman and Rabbinic scholar whose exegetical system was significantly advanced for that time period.

A small but brief window had opened in England during the Reformation for Hebrew studies, but the roadblocks to full public acceptance were great. England had long banished Jews from living in England1 during Lightfoot’s era. Later novels like Ivanhoe by Walter Scott, and Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens indicate negative perceptions concerning the Jewish race was strong. In light of these obstacles, Lightfoot began a very scholarly journey into the connection between Judaism and Christianity. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time doing a great job. He was a time anomaly. He should not have succeeded in this field of studies, but he did, and his work, though with some defects, has withstood the test of time.

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Antisemitism in the Ancient Church

A brief look into the earlier Church, its treatment of outsiders of the faith, and Jews.

If anyone begins to read ecclesiastical writings with keen interest, it will be inevitable that one has to struggle with the antisemitic remarks in ancient Christian literature. As the researcher looks further into the issue, one finds a problematic and complex genre that requires untangling.

Table of Contents

Antisemitism was a small part of a much larger problem. This fervor was not directly a problem with Jews but anyone or anything outside the Christian realm. The Church viewed anyone outside of the Christian community as less-than-human. One of the more obvious discriminatory references in ancient Christian literature and regular Greek ones was against the Scythians (ancient Russian people). Christianity’s political and military aspirations in some epochs sought to annihilate any person or population that did not embrace its message. They sometimes spared Jews due to their theological history. Although they often were exempted from the sword, they were second-class citizens.

At least they could tell their story of oppression. The many other pagans and whole unclassified communities who refused to convert have stories that will permanently remain unknown.

The narrative explained above is the dark side of our Christian heritage that forces any Christian theologian or leader to grapple with at some juncture.

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Why the Evangelical Church is Declining

Candy bar with Jesus name

Outlining how the superficiality and the anti-intellectualism of the Evangelical movement are causing a significant decline in membership and the remedy for it.

Churches from numerous types of backgrounds see that their numbers are dropping and are quickly upgrading their style of worship. Other solutions are renovating the church foyer into coffee shops, pressing people into the small weekly groups, producing appealing dramas, or spending on new personnel and equipment to better communicate through the web, apps, video and other burgeoning technologies. These approaches help, but there is something far more profound going on.

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Book Review: Mental Disorders and Spiritual Healing

Mental Disorders and Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East by Jean-Claude Larchet is an examination of mental illness from an Eastern Christian perspective.

Larchet completes a definitive work on the history, perceptions, and practices of the Eastern Church on mental illness. One has to read it for its historical value. This text is not for those looking at therapeutic solutions for those suffering or dealing with a person struggling with some form of mental illness.

The author’s knowledge of modern psychological conventions and Eastern Church practices is finely interwoven. He provided substantial documentation.

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