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Search by subject, then refine by approach. A prophecy study may also be apologetic or discerning because subject tells you what it examines, while approach tells you how it examines it.
25 results for “Early Christianity”
Clear searchBrian 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, res…
View recommendation →Hippolytus · Exposition, prophecy, and polemic · early third century
…Christ and Antichrist draws repeatedly from the biblical text and preserves a compelling early discussion of Daniel, the Antichrist, Christ's return, and the future kingdom. His Refutation of All Heresies also records and challenges many competing teachings. Together the writing…
View recommendation →R. V. Sellers · Theological biography and history of doctrine · 1928
A reconstruction of the life, conflicts, surviving writings, and Christology of Eustathius of Antioch, a prominent opponent of Arianism whose career illuminates both the Council of Nicaea and the unsettled theological and political struggles which followed it.
View recommendation →Irenaeus of Lyons · Early Christian theology and polemic · c. 180–190
…oodness of creation, and the unity of the Old and New Testaments. He is also an important early witness to a future earthly kingdom: his premillennial passages show that this expectation cannot simply be dismissed as a recent invention. Read Irenaeus as an early witness, not as a…
View recommendation →Tertullian · Apologetic, doctrinal, and practical treatises · c. 197–220
…ourage under persecution, and an uncompromising emphasis on holy living. Tertullian is an early witness, not a final authority. His later association with the New Prophecy, his growing severity, and some extreme practical conclusions require discernment; even his strongest argume…
View recommendation →Marvin W. Meyer · Historical sourcebook · 1987
A wide-ranging collection of ancient texts which opens a window onto the mystery religions of the Mediterranean world—their gods, initiations, sacrifices, prayers, festivals, secret rites, and hopes for blessing or life beyond death.
View recommendation →Which Gospel does the Qur'an affirm?
…no one can now locate in their history? This is the Injeel problem. It is not merely that Christianity and Islam disagree. It is that Islam appeals to a Gospel which it cannot historically produce, while rejecting the Gospel which history actually supplies. The strongest Islamic…
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 →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 G…
Read article →Christianity, Islam and the verdict of the evidence
The Sum of These Things Christianity, Islam and the verdict of the evidence “Now of the things which we have spoken this is the sum: We have such an high priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Ma…
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,…
View recommendation →History, heresy, and the temptation of private Christianity
Have Evangelicals Become Neo-Gnostics? History, Heresy, and the Temptation of Private Christianity The accusation identifies real evangelical deformations—secret-key religion, escape rhetoric, elite conversion status, and churchless faith—but fails when it becomes a historica…
Read article →The crucifixion in history, Scripture and the Qur'an
Did Jesus Really Die? The crucifixion in history, Scripture and the Qur'an Christianity and Islam cannot both be correct about the death of Jesus. The Gospel declares that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, died, was buried and rose bodily from the dead. His…
Read article →Eustathius of Antioch, the human soul of Christ and the pictures created by our words
…areless modern preaching. Christians were struggling with its underlying questions in the early fourth century, even as they defended the eternal deity of the Son. Eustathius of Antioch saw one danger with unusual clarity: if the divine Word merely took the place of a human soul…
Read article →Matthew, the Hebrew word almah, and a sign whose meaning reaches beyond Ahaz
…k word parthenos for Isaiah 7:14. The Jewish Greek translation of Isaiah, produced before Christianity, already rendered almah with parthenos, the ordinary Greek term for a virgin or maiden. This point is sometimes overstated by saying that seventy or seventy-two Jewish scholars…
Read article →A response to Hank Hanegraaff on resurrection, Daniel’s final week, and the Tribulation
…ter use of Daniel’s language redundant. Jesus Himself prevents that conclusion. Speaking nearly two centuries after Antiochus, He directs His hearers towards the abomination spoken of by Daniel. Antiochus had established the pattern; Christ still expected another manifestation of…
Read article →Testing Islam's evidence for divine revelation
…eism? Those questions deserve answers, and the preceding articles have supplied them. But Christianity is not the only faith carrying a burden of proof. Islam does not merely criticise Christian revelation. It presents another book, another prophet and another account of Jesus, t…
Read article →The covenant son and the sacrifice that points to Christ
…nferred from the sequence and supplied by interpretation. This difference is fundamental. Christianity does not begin with an unnamed son and reason backwards from later religious geography. It begins with a text which repeatedly gives the name. The strongest Islamic case The Mus…
Read article →Why the Trinity is not polytheism—and why Christians confess one God
…ristians believed the Father, Son, and Spirit were three separate divine beings. Historic Christianity denies precisely that. The doctrine of the Trinity is an attempt to hold together everything Scripture reveals: there is one God; the Father is God; the Son is God; the Holy Spi…
Read article →An unrequited love for the historic Church
…ry later development apostolic. There is a particular accusation made against evangelical Christianity that I feel more deeply than might be expected. We are told that we are rootless individualists: Christians without a Church, readers without rulers, minds pursuing private illu…
Read article →Spiritual ecstasy, altered states, and discerning what is from God
…ripides, The Bacchae. Lynneth Miller Renberg, “Divine Punishment or Disease? Medieval and Early Modern Approaches to the 1518 Strasbourg Dancing Plague”. Encyclopaedia Iranica, “Ḏekr”, on remembrance, group recitation, and ecstasy in Sufi traditions. Rachel Harris, “Pulled by God…
Read article →The Messiah cut off before the Temple fell
…s not possess. But they do not remove the problem. Daniel 9 existed within Judaism before Christianity. Its prophecy places the cutting off of an anointed figure before the destruction of the city and sanctuary. Jesus appeared during the Second Temple period, was recognised as th…
Read article →The glory philosophy could not contain
…r an objection. It should enlarge our worship. The Incarnation is not merely a difficulty Christianity can survive; it is glory Christianity alone can proclaim. The Maker entered His creation. The eternal Son made our nature His own. The One whom the heaven of heavens cannot cont…
Read article →Constantine, Arius, the Trinity, the biblical canon—and the myths that refuse to die
…to die The Council of Nicaea has become a screen upon which almost every conspiracy about early Christianity is projected. Constantine invented the Trinity. Jesus was voted into deity. Paganism defeated biblical Christianity. The emperor chose the books of the Bible. Reincarnatio…
Read article →Trusting God when voices seek to weaken our confidence
…his ancestry. The lesson does not depend upon settling that question. What the passage clearly shows is a man using familiarity with the people’s faith to undermine their confidence in God. There is a warning here for the church. Religious language, learning, and public standing…
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