Category: Philosophy
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Human Perfection
Being Perfect In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that we are to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. The word for “perfect” in the sermon is the Greek word “telos.” Jesus, however, presumably spoke Aramaic, a derivative of Hebrew, so even though the text of Matthew 5:48 is in Koine…
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The Name of God
No God but God Often, much is made of names, particularly, the name of God. But what is the name of God? And why is it so important to get it right? As Shakespeare’s Juliet put it, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”…
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Alternative Righteousness
Jesus’ Greatest Hits For the longest time, I thought of the Sermon on the Mount as a hodgepodge of wise sayings, a list of proverbs and parables strung together in some loosely coherent fashion. Then, I heard Dallas Willard say that the Sermon actually is a true, complete, and singular sermon. While Jesus may not…
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Beginning with James
Not in a Vacuum: Intertextual Dialectics Some scholars contend that the books of the New Testament were written in dialogue one with another, such that no book was written in a vacuum, but dialectically in contradistinction one with another: each book was written to contend with, correct, or dialogue with some other book. In a…
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Through the Lens of Job
First things first Scholars have long conceded that the oldest book of the Bible, of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, is the Book of Job, which can be dated to about 2000 BC. The Book of Job was written well before any of the other books of the Old Testament were written, the earliest…
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What if No One Cared?
An existential exploration of nihilism and its limits in the scope of the optimism of hope Imagine yourself sitting there at the keyboard of your computer, typing out strings of words in what you hope is a semblance of sense, and sending them off into the vast void of the worldwide web, wondering whether any…
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What is Truth?
Some Basics about Truth Truth is one of those things you just cannot escape, no matter how much you might try and deny it. Truth is embedded in reality because reality itself is founded upon and made up of truth. What is is truth. But trying to define and pin down truth in an exact…
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Freewill and the Flood
A Pressing Question Whoever has read Genesis knows it starts out with God giving a choice to Adam and Eve, which results in their falling from grace and being cast out of the Garden of Eden. From this then follows a whole lot of sinning by their many descendants. Things get so out of control…
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The Problem of Evil
Stating the Problem The problem of evil is a rather obvious problem in the world, visceral as it is in the common experience of humanity. Many have taken a stab at it, either to prove or disprove the existence of the Almighty, who seems to rather hide away within the whole matter. Even the biblical…
NathanAnthonyBarstad 