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79 results for “Church”
Clear searchChrist the promised Seed, Gentile inheritance, and Paul's final blessing
Are Abraham's Seed and the Israel of God the Church? Christ the promised Seed, Gentile inheritance, and Paul's final blessing Galatians contains two of the strongest arguments for identifying the Church as Israel. First, Paul says that…
Read article →A history of interpretation, polemic, and forgotten tension
How Supersessionism Took Root in the Early Church A history of interpretation, polemic, and forgotten tension Supersessionism did not appear in one moment through one theologian. It developed as the Church became increasingly Gentile…
Read article →Unity in Christ and distinction in God's purpose
Are Israel and the Church Really the Same? Unity in Christ and distinction in God's purpose The New Testament teaches a unity so profound that it would have startled the ancient world. In Christ, Jewish and Ge…
Read article →What 'yea and Amen' in Christ means for Israel and the covenants
Do All God's Promises Transfer to the Church? What "yea and Amen" in Christ means for Israel and the covenants Paul makes one of the most comprehensive statements about the promises of God: "For all the promises of God in him ar…
Read article →The question reaches beyond prophecy to the faithfulness of God
Israel and the Church: Why This Series Matters The question reaches beyond prophecy to the faithfulness of God Has the Church replaced Israel in the purpose of God? Some Christians answer yes, although the…
Read article →Samuel G. Green · Historical survey · 1904
Of the several church histories I have read, A Handbook of Church History remains one of the best. Green handles an enormous sweep of people, events, doctrines, and institutions with unusual clarity, yet d…
View recommendation →What Christ’s promise establishes—and what claims about infallible teaching still need to prove
Does Matthew 16:18 Establish Church Infallibility? Few promises offer Christians greater assurance than these words of Jesus: “I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” — Matthew 16:18…
Read article →Earth-dwellers, heaven-dwellers, and the literary structure of the Apocalypse
Where Is the Church during Revelation's Judgements? Earth-dwellers, heaven-dwellers, and the literary structure of the Apocalypse The argument that the word church disappears after Revelation 3 is often…
Read article →Brian E. Daley · Historical theology · 1991
I recommend The Hope of the Early Church because it showed me how varied early Christian thinking about death and the world to come really was. Daley traces the development of the intermediate state, apokatastasis, resurrect…
View recommendation →The olive tree, the natural branches, and the limits of the metaphor
…within it, and unbelieving Jewish branches have been removed. Surely the tree is now the Church, the Church is Israel, and the distinction has disappeared. That argument gives the metaphor real weight, but it moves too quickly. Paul does not say that Gentiles are grafted into Is…
Read article →Circumcision of the heart and the identity of Paul's inward Jew
…the Spirit is now a true or spiritual Jew. Since Christians possess that inward work, the Church has become spiritual Israel. That reading takes Paul's contrast seriously. Outward privilege without inward reality cannot please God. Circumcision cannot protect a lawbreaker from ju…
Read article →Fulfilment in Christ, the inclusion of the Gentiles, and Israel's future mercy
…and the fulfilment of Israel's story. Those who belong to Christ are Abraham's seed. The Church receives Israel's covenant titles, the kingdom is taken from unbelieving Israel and given to a fruit-bearing nation, and all God's promises are yea and amen in Christ. There is one go…
Read article →Conditional blessing, irrevocable promise, and fulfilment in Christ
…ld remain impossible. God promises the very cleansing and obedience He requires. Does the Church receive the new covenant? Yes. Jesus identified the cup at the Last Supper as "the new testament in my blood" (Luke 22:20). Paul called himself and his fellow workers ministers of the…
Read article →One Messiah, one gospel, and God's continuing purpose for Israel
…ospel, and God's continuing purpose for Israel This series began with a question: has the Church permanently replaced Israel in the purpose of God? The answer cannot be reached by asking whether Christ fulfils the promises. He does. Nor can it be settled by asking whether Gentile…
Read article →What Jesus promised the apostles about Israel's future
…kward text for any theology in which national Israel has permanently disappeared into the Church. The promise names the rulers, their thrones, the time of their rule, and those over whom they exercise authority. Each part should be allowed to retain its natural force. The promise…
Read article →The wicked husbandmen, the fruit-bearing nation, and what Jesus said afterwards
…ne body of Christ and taught to bear the fruit God required. This is a real transfer. The Church does not merely observe the kingdom from a distance. Believers presently possess its spiritual blessings, submit to its King, proclaim its gospel, and bear responsibility as His peopl…
Read article →Election within Abraham's family, the believing remnant, and the future of the nation
…the children of promise: everyone who believes in Christ, whether Jewish or Gentile. The Church is therefore the Israel within Israel, while unbelieving ethnic Israel no longer possesses a distinct covenant identity or future. Paul certainly denies that physical descent guarante…
Read article →Defining the position before testing it
…t it can also conceal important differences. Many Christians accused of teaching that the Church replaced Israel would reject that wording. They believe that the Church is the fulfilment, continuation, or expansion of Israel rather than its substitute. The discussion should there…
Read article →Why Israel's failure cannot make the word of God fail
…solve the problem by saying that Israel's name and promises now refer exclusively to the Church. Instead, the nation remains "beloved for the fathers' sakes", because "the gifts and calling of God are without repentance" (Romans 11:28-29). The phrase does not excuse unbelief. It…
Read article →What God's faithfulness to Israel means for everyone who trusts His promises
…doctrine. It tests how we understand the faithfulness of the God upon whose promises the Church itself depends. The opposing case deserves to be stated fairly Most thoughtful supersessionists do not believe God lied to Israel. They do not imagine Him tearing up His covenants or…
Read article →Israel's Messiah, Israel's Scriptures, and a gospel for the world
…e understand Jesus, the apostles, the gospel, and the relationship between Israel and the Church. Jesus was born within Israel's covenant world Jesus was not a Gentile religious founder who arrived with an unrelated faith. He was born to a Jewish mother, circumcised on the eighth…
Read article →A sign of Israel's renewal, not Israel's disappearance
…me also there is a remnant according to the election of grace." —Romans 11:5 The earliest Church was born from that believing remnant. Jesus, the apostles, the women who followed Him, the believers gathered before Pentecost, and the thousands added in Jerusalem were Jewish. Genti…
Read article →The Venerable Bede · Ecclesiastical and national history · 731
I recommend Bede because he brings the early English Church out of abstraction and fills it with people, places, journeys, decisions, failures, and acts of courage. His history shows how the gospel crossed cultures and kingdoms, how political…
View recommendation →Regathering, national rebirth, and the spiritual renewal still to come
Biblical regathering promises, Israel's modern national restoration, and the still-future spiritual renewal under Messiah examined together.
Read article →Edward Burman · Historical survey · 1984
…It is disturbing history, but necessary history for understanding what can happen when a church claims the power to compel belief. The history of the Inquisitions is heavily disputed, and both sensational legends and defensive revisions can distort the evidence. Treat this as a…
View recommendation →Divine judgement, the character of God, and the promise of escape
Is the Church Appointed to the Tribulation's Wrath? Divine judgement, the character of God, and the promise of escape The claim that the Church is not appointed to wrath is sometimes answered too q…
Read article →How Christians can think politically without surrendering conscience to a package deal
Your Party Is Not Your Church How Christians can think politically without surrendering conscience to a package deal Political parties do not merely ask for our votes. Increasingly, they offer an entire identity.…
Read article →An unrequited love for the historic Church
Standing at the Door An Unrequited Love for the Historic Church I do not stand outside the historic Church because I despise her. I stand outside because I love much of what I find within her, yet cannot call every later development apostolic. The…
Read article →Responding to five common criticisms without defending what Scripture does not require
…sed by slogans before it is defined. It allegedly began with John Nelson Darby, turns the Church into God's failed contingency plan, ignores the fulfilment of prophecy in AD 70, baptises modern politics, and restores animal sacrifices in competition with the cross. Some dispensat…
Read article →J. C. Ryle · Doctrinal and pastoral essays · 1874
…ctrine intelligible turn the collection into far more than a record of nineteenth-century Church of England debates. Ryle writes openly as an evangelical Churchman defending a particular position within the controversies of his own century. Some chapters depend upon the language,…
View recommendation →Why a loaded label does not settle the question
…secret there. The real question is whether Scripture distinguishes Christ coming for His Church from His later return with His saints. That question cannot be answered by attaching a loaded label to one side. It must be answered by comparing the passages themselves. What Paul ac…
Read article →Spiritual ecstasy, altered states, and discerning what is from God
…pirit The question becomes especially urgent when extraordinary behaviour occurs inside a church and is attributed to the Holy Spirit. Beginning in 1994, the movement known as the Toronto Blessing attracted visitors from around the world to the Toronto Airport Vineyard church. Pe…
Read article →What the historical evidence proves—and what it does not
…at pretribulationism cannot be apostolic. Two questions are being confused. Did the early Church possess a settled system identical to modern dispensational pretribulationism? No. Did Darby invent the resurrection of dead believers, the transformation and catching up of the livin…
Read article →Irenaeus of Lyons · Early Christian theology and polemic · c. 180–190
…but antiquity does not make every interpretation correct. When he speaks of the catholic Church, the word means the universal or whole Church confessing the apostolic faith; it must not be treated as proof that he would endorse every doctrine or institution of the later Church w…
View recommendation →Tertullian · Apologetic, doctrinal, and practical treatises · c. 197–220
…even his strongest arguments must be tested by Scripture. His references to the catholic Church belong to the language and disputes of the early Church and do not establish his agreement with every later Roman Catholic doctrine. Historical continuity must be demonstrated rather…
View recommendation →The positive argument of the whole series, brought together
…whole doctrine. Together they form a coherent movement: Christ completes and gathers His Church, resumes Daniel's unfinished programme concerning Israel and Jerusalem, judges the beast's world while saving a multitude within it, and later returns with His redeemed people to deli…
Read article →The LORD, Zion, and the meaning of Beulah in Isaiah 62:4–5
…of the promised land. The promises are complementary rather than competitive. Christ, the Church, and the Inheritance The New Testament reveals that the Abrahamic promises reach their fulfilment through Jesus Christ. He is the promised Seed, the Davidic King, Israel’s Messiah, an…
Read article →A response to Michael Horton on the land promise, Amos 9, and the people of God
…miah 31:36 A Christian reading must recognise the new covenant's present blessings in the Church. It must also account for the national language of the prophecy rather than assuming that application to the Church empties its original recipients from the promise. Christ is not the…
Read article →R. V. Sellers · Theological biography and history of doctrine · 1928
…of Antioch Council of Nicaea Christology Arian controversy Incarnation Divinity of Christ Church and empire
View recommendation →The event is explicit; the real dispute is its timing
…r the sequence while belonging to the same Lord. The issue matters because it affects the Church's expectation, its reading of prophecy, and its understanding of the coming wrath. It does not determine whether Christ has saved a person. That distinction allows the argument to be…
Read article →History, heresy, and the temptation of private Christianity
…angelical deformations—secret-key religion, escape rhetoric, elite conversion status, and churchless faith—but fails when it becomes a historical genealogy or a substitute for doctrinal argument. Imagine a Christian whose faith is assembled from prophecy videos, private impressio…
Read article →Hippolytus · Exposition, prophecy, and polemic · early third century
…ed merely because they are ancient. His use of catholic language describes the whole true Church as he understood it; it does not mean that every later claim of the modern Roman Catholic Church can be read back into him. Check both authorship and interpretation, and let Scripture…
View recommendation →Constantine, Arius, the Trinity, the biblical canon—and the myths that refuse to die
…t. Those facts should not be minimised. But he did not introduce the deity of Christ to a Church which had never believed it, he did not decide the outcome by himself, and the council did not choose the books of the Bible. Nicaea was an attempt by bishops, enjoying unprecedented…
Read article →Augustine of Hippo · Spiritual autobiography and prayer · c. 397–400
Augustine's searching account of restless desire, intellectual wandering, entrenched sin, conversion, memory, prayer, and the grace of God, written not merely as autobiography but as an extended confession addressed to God.
View recommendation →Abraham, Lot, divine wrath, and a pattern that must be used carefully
…stablish the timing of the rapture alone. Persecution is not the same as divine wrath The Church is repeatedly promised trouble from the world. Jesus says, “In the world ye shall have tribulation” (John 16:33). Believers may be hated, imprisoned, and killed. Those promises make i…
Read article →A forensic reading of Christ's Olivet Discourse
…nt applies the language of election to Christians, so the elect in Matthew 24 must be the Church. If they are gathered after the Tribulation, the passage appears to place the rapture there as well. The first premise is possible. It is not yet proven. "Elect" can describe the Chur…
Read article →Signs, expectancy, and the event the Church is told to await
…christ Must Come First, Is Christ's Coming Imminent? Signs, expectancy, and the event the Church is told to await Imminency does not mean that Christ was required to return within the apostles' lifetime. It means that no revealed prophetic event must first occur before the Church…
Read article →Isaiah, John, and the Divine Identity of Jesus Christ
…e redemption (1:13–14). Paul then explains His relation to creation before turning to the church, resurrection and reconciliation. “Firstborn” translates prōtotokos (πρωτότοκος). Its ordinary use concerns the child born first. Chronological priority is a real part of its semantic…
Read article →Dave Hunt · Devotional theology and biblical exhortation · 2000
…n living. Hunt ranges across the gospel, faith, love for God, discipleship, doctrine, the Church, and the believer's heavenly hope, but the recurring appeal is intensely practical: take God at His word and let that truth govern the whole life. The book's breadth makes it especial…
View recommendation →Near-death experiences, neuroscience, and the authority of Christ
…ake the cross unnecessary or turn the experiencer into a new source of revelation for the Church. The test is not whether the story frightens us or comforts us. It is whether its claims agree with the revelation God has already given. What Scripture allows us to affirm We do not…
Read article →How an openly transmitted text survived copying, criticism, and centuries of examination
…did not travel through one vulnerable channel The New Testament writings circulated among churches in different places. Copies produced further copies; early translations carried the text into Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and other languages; Christian authors quoted passages in sermon…
Read article →The incarnation, the limits of created perspective and the love philosophy could not imagine
…e mixture of Jewish, ascetic, visionary and philosophical ideas confronting the Colossian church. Paul was not secretly writing a refutation of Plotinus. (See Note 3.) Nevertheless, Colossians delivers a theological judgement upon every system that separates divine fullness from…
Read article →Why the final seven is unfinished, future, and centred upon Israel and Jerusalem
…'s measured programme for Israel and Jerusalem awaits its final phase while God forms the Church from Jew and Gentile in one body. The length of the interval is not a defect in God's promise. Scripture repeatedly joins divine patience to the apparent delay of judgement (2 Peter 3…
Read article →A quiet invitation to draw near to Christ
…ing room for fellowship with Him? An invitation to draw near The risen Lord speaks to the church at Laodicea with both correction and love. In that setting, He says: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock…” — Revelation 3:20 His invitation is to a shared meal. Fellowship. Time t…
Read article →Why the Son assumed a complete human nature, not merely a body
…complete humanity united to the eternal Word without producing two personal subjects? The Church’s language was still developing because all the biblical truths had to be held together at once. Article five will take up that question directly. For now, the essential point is that…
Read article →The crucifixion in history, Scripture and the Qur'an
…hristian confession of a real crucifixion remains clear across a geographically dispersed church soon after the apostolic period. Second, the alternative he answers is not presented as a historical memory preserved by witnesses who saw Jesus escape. It is a doctrinal claim associ…
Read article →Eustathius of Antioch, the human soul of Christ and the pictures created by our words
…use he lacked conviction. It was underdeveloped at the point of personal unity. The later Church would need to say that Christ’s humanity was complete but did not constitute a second human person alongside the Son. The eternal Son is the personal subject of both the divine and hu…
Read article →Why apantēsis does not settle the timing of the rapture
…o second comings? The objection is sometimes restated rhetorically: if Christ gathers the Church and later descends in judgement, pretribulationism has invented two second comings. That misdescribes the claim. Pretribulationism sees one future advent with distinguishable movement…
Read article →Origen, Arius and the line between Creator and creation
…a brilliant, influential and sometimes troubling theologian whose writings show that the Church did not immediately possess a perfectly settled vocabulary for everything Scripture revealed about Christ. The truth was present in the apostolic writings. The language used to defend…
Read article →The gathering of the elect, one taken and one left, and Paul's revealed mystery
…hered as the kingdom approaches. These features do not make the passage irrelevant to the Church. All Scripture instructs the Church, and Christians living before the destruction of Jerusalem could heed Christ's warning. They do show that the discourse is operating within Israel'…
Read article →The man of sin, the last trumpet, the first resurrection, and the last day
…the KJV and reaches back naturally to the day in verse 2. Paul does not plainly say, "The Church must see the man of sin before it can be gathered." The apostasia should not be forced to mean a spatial departure. It normally denotes rebellion or defection. The restrainer is more…
Read article →Does John 6 teach the literal eating of Christ's body?
…ments as Christ’s body and blood; no command, “This do in remembrance of me”; no gathered-church observance; no explanation that bread and wine change substance; no priestly act by which Christ becomes orally available. Even if the discourse has Eucharistic implications, it does…
Read article →Seeing God, bodily resurrection, and life in the renewed creation
…ine simply denies bodily resurrection or the renewed earth. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explicitly teaches that the righteous will reign with Christ “glorified in body and soul” and that the universe itself will be renewed. It calls the beatific vision the wellspring of…
Read article →A response to Hank Hanegraaff on resurrection, Daniel’s final week, and the Tribulation
…ve but theologically imprecise. Classical dispensationalism distinguishes Israel from the Church. It does not therefore require two gospels, two saviours or two methods of salvation. Jews and Gentiles are reconciled to God through the blood of Christ. The distinction concerns cov…
Read article →Why the distinction matters when we speak about Jesus
…lers of this world “crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8). Acts speaks of “the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood” (Acts 20:28). The one who shed His blood is identified by who He is: the Lord of glory, the Son of God. We may therefore say that G…
Read article →Seth D. Postell, Eitan Bar & Erez Soref · Messianic biblical theology · 2017
…use it treats the Torah neither as an embarrassing relic nor as a covenant code which the Church must simply re-enact. The authors read its narratives, patterns, promises, and commandments as a coherent witness whose goal is found in Yeshua. Their Jewish and Israeli setting makes…
View recommendation →Sources behind Qur’anic narratives
…so expand earlier material imaginatively, combine sources or invent edifying stories. The Church did not reject the Infancy Gospel of Thomas because Christians were determined to suppress the clay birds. The canonical Gospels were received because of their apostolic origin, early…
Read article →How the Lord knows His own—and how their lives bear His name
…those who name Christ is also real. We must not use either truth to silence the other. A church troubled by words that eat like a disease Paul did not write these words during a peaceful theological discussion. Timothy was facing teachers whose words were doing serious harm. Hym…
Read article →Which Gospel does the Qur'an affirm?
…ds, Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Ethiopia and regions connected with Arabia. Their churches disagreed sharply over Christology, councils, episcopal authority and imperial power. They used different liturgical languages. Some lived beyond Byzantine control. Yet the Gospel b…
Read article →The near was real. The far is still coming.
…ming nor make it exhaustive. Equally, “Zion” should not silently become a synonym for the Church or the eternal New Jerusalem. There are genuine canonical grounds for those associations. Hebrews 12:22 speaks of believers having come to Mount Sion and the heavenly Jerusalem. Galat…
Read article →Sir Robert Anderson · Biblical and apologetic argument · 1897
…tied to his dispensational distinctions and to his understanding of miracles, Israel, the Church, and the apostolic age. That framework must itself be tested rather than assumed. The book offers a theological argument, not a complete pastoral answer to every sufferer, and it shou…
View recommendation →Christianity, Islam and the verdict of the evidence
…them. That is not said to mock the converts. Their confusion also belongs at the feet of churches which entertained but did not teach, gathered crowds but did not catechise, and told people to believe without preparing them to explain what they believed. If someone leaves Christ…
Read article →The glory philosophy could not contain
…God. All things were made by him.” — John 1:1–3 Then comes the sentence before which the Church can only wonder: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” — John 1:14 For John, this is not a divine intelligence sliding downward through the levels of reality. Nor is it a…
Read article →Born, begotten and firstborn in the eternal identity and saving work of the Son
…rom the dead Paul immediately uses prōtotokos again: “And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence.” — Colossians 1:18 Revelation 1:5 likewise calls Him “the first begotten of the d…
Read article →The Gospel, Human Perception, and the Illuminating Work of the Holy Spirit
…te faithfully. The answer may reveal that the person heard “become respectable,” “join my church,” “support this political outlook,” or “agree to a religious story so that God will overlook your mistakes.” If so, there is something to clarify before describing the conversation as…
Read article →Governmental restraint, the final ten kings, and the preparation of the temple
…s of the argument. Tertullian’s following chapter envisages the beast making war upon the Church, so his testimony cannot be treated as endorsement of my pretribulational sequence. Chrysostom’s agreement about Rome likewise establishes no agreement about a future millennium. Thei…
Read article →Michael Brown, 2 Thessalonians 1, and the public vindication of the saints
…n flaming fire, taking vengeance upon the disobedient. Brown therefore concludes that the Church receives deliverance at Christ’s public return, not in a prior rapture. This is a serious argument. It deserves something better than an appeal to a disputed Greek meaning, an ingenio…
Read article →Trusting God when voices seek to weaken our confidence
…the people’s faith to undermine their confidence in God. There is a warning here for the church. Religious language, learning, and public standing do not make every voice trustworthy. We must attend to what a teacher is asking us to believe. Does the teaching help us understand…
Read article →Labour, purpose, and faithfulness in a fallen world
…fear and serve. There are circumstances in which a person genuinely cannot work, and the Church must never turn these passages into contempt for the poor, sick or unemployed. Scripture which commends diligence also commands generosity, mercy and practical care. The purpose is no…
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