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Rediscovering the early first century Jewish roots of Christianity There were no Christians following Jesus Christianity in the early first century was a rather homogeneous community of powerless, underprivileged, and disadvantaged Jews. It was not made up of well-to-do, powerful Gentiles, non-Jews, let alone White Evangelical Americans. It would not be until Constantine the Great…
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The Serenity Prayer, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference,” is as simple and yet profound a prayer as any. Learning “to accept the things I cannot change” is much like living “as if.” The…
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More about Intertextual Dialectics An Outlined Sketch Unlike intertextuality, which is largely comprised of the comparative study of texts in dialogue with one another, different and various contexts contrasting with and complementing one another, intertextual dialectics is the dialogical study of the manner in which texts of a comparatively given similitude conflict with or contradict…
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What made Jesus so powerful in his day and age? Was it his miracles? His words and teaching? His presence? His love and forgiveness? His eventual sacrifice? While these are very important to adherents today, in his time, Jesus’ power was found not in any of these, per se, but in his goodness. Plato writes…
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Long has my mind been plagued with the question of whence cometh evil? I know the freewill argument indicates that it originates in the will of the one exercising said will. I know that some indicate that evil is but an illusion of the mind, which need be eradicated. I know that the devil or…
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Thesis statement:The existence of evil presupposes the existence of God. If is-ness is, then is-not-ness is as a corollary of the correlative relation obtaining between contraries. For if this is, then it is not, of course, that which it is not, being positively that which it is, which might be accorded as its is-ness and…
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What is Power? Power, I have often heard, is not a good thing–it’s a necessary evil, even. As the saying goes, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” On the other hand, some say that “knowledge is power.” If power is evil and knowledge is power, then it must be that knowledge, too, is evil. Intuitively, it seems,…
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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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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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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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NathanAnthonyBarstad 