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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.
40 results for “Early Church”
Clear searchA 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 →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, res…
View recommendation →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 →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 →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
…of Antioch Council of Nicaea Christology Arian controversy Incarnation Divinity of Christ Church and empire
View recommendation →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 →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 →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 →What the historical evidence proves—and what it does not
…ows that 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…
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 →Why Israel's failure cannot make the word of God fail
…ns what He says. Israel's unbelief cannot cancel God's truth Paul confronts the principle early in Romans: "For what if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect? God forbid: yea, let God be true, but every man a liar; as it is written, That…
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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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
…ting a pathology report, and proposed physiological explanations vary. What the passage clearly establishes within the narrative is that the soldiers found Jesus dead, treated Him as dead and inflicted a wound which would remove any reasonable possibility of survival. A theory th…
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 →Origen, Arius and the line between Creator and creation
…Father and the Son? The question takes us into one of the most important developments in early Christian doctrine. It also introduces us to Origen: a brilliant, influential and sometimes troubling theologian whose writings show that the Church did not immediately possess a perfe…
Read article →Does John 6 teach the literal eating of Christ's body?
…nstrument of that reception in John 6 is faith—not the physical mechanism of a sacrament. Early Christian witnesses including Tertullian and Augustine reached the same conclusion from the text. Their testimony is not offered as an infallible authority alongside Scripture. It demo…
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 →Sources behind Qur’anic narratives
…re importantly, Pseudo-Matthew’s composition date is disputed. Proposals range around the early seventh century and later, making it difficult to prove that its surviving form preceded the Qur’an. The two texts may reflect a related infancy tradition. One may depend indirectly up…
Read article →The near was real. The far is still coming.
…l corroboration, but it should not carry an argument that belongs first to Isaiah. John clearly appropriates Isaiah’s imagery in Revelation 6:13–14. Stars fall like figs, and: “And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together…” — Revelation 6:14 The relationship is…
Read article →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
…restored to deity. (See Note 2.) At first glance, this can sound surprisingly Christian. Nearly every landmark is present. There is the Word. There is creation. There is descent. There is flesh. There is a return to divine glory. But the road runs in the opposite direction—and th…
Read article →Born, begotten and firstborn in the eternal identity and saving work of the Son
…, enthronement and saving work within history? --- More than twenty years ago, during the early part of my Christian walk, one sentence in Scripture troubled me: “Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.” — Psalm 2:7; Acts 13:33 Acts appeared to connect this “begetting” wi…
Read article →Governmental restraint, the final ten kings, and the preparation of the temple
…ruler; its displacement can allow power to be reorganised and concentrated in his hands. Early Christian writers recognised this possibility, and Daniel and Revelation supply a political setting worth examining alongside it. The temple raises a related question of preparation. A…
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
…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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