Religion

The dialectical spirit of ecumenism gives rise, among other things, to a question whose full answer is still awaited: How is it that the critical spirit and rationalism of Enlightenment origin, combined with making the Bible available to ordinary people, has led to so many schisms?

This question is asked by critics who want to point out the social, cultural and contextual nature of the Christian religion, and its relativism, presenting it as a product of society rather than of revelation.

In those times when grief accompanies us and we find ourselves alone in the middle of the night, does God shed tears with us?

We have trouble understanding and accepting the image of a loving God, as we have grown too familiar with the type of love that offers itself only when it finds in a person the qualities that make them easy to love.

Virtually every civilization has been characterised by religious beliefs about the end of all things, not least about the timing and the conditions that precede the end, and signs of its imminence. There are many differences between these beliefs across civilisations, but many similarities too.

The New Testament would have looked quite different[1] without the influence of Athanasius the Great, bishop of Alexandria and church father of the Christian Church in the 4th century.

Founded on the separation of political and religious authority and shaped by the presumed liberating power of reason, contemporary society is driven by faith in progress as a substitute for faith in God. At the heart of this secularized world, a pressing question emerges: what role does the Church still play today?

"Is it not too sadly true that we can recollect anything but Christ, and forget nothing so easy as Him whom we ought to remember?"—Charles Spurgeon

His philosophy and theology dominated human thought for over a thousand years. Until Thomas Aquinas emerged in the 13th century, Augustine was undoubtedly the most important thinker of the medieval period.

Right from the first centuries, the scenario of the second coming of Jesus was interpreted spiritually-allegorically by some, and politically-ecclesiastically by others. As we have learned from the previous article of this series, even the main millenarian movement in antiquity (Montanism) led to an anti-apocalyptic reaction on the part of moderate Christianity. Is this rejection of apocalyptic millenarianism justified? What does Revelation actually...

When we try to understand our fellow human beings, to grasp their thinking, the reasons behind their decisions, and the purpose of their actions, a familiar adage from popular wisdom comes to mind: “Put yourself in their shoes.”

Christianity is either historical or not. It claims that “God acted decisively in history, revealing Himself in external, specific events attested in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.”[1] The most important of these events was the coming of Jesus as the Messiah, the saving Christ.

“Jerusalem crucified the Lord, Rome beheaded and crucified his chief apostles and plunged the whole Roman church into a baptism of blood. Rome became, for good and for evil, the Jerusalem of Christendom, and the Vatican hill the Golgotha of the West. The cross was substituted for the sword as the symbol of conquest and power” [1].

In the US, the shocking news of Charles Manson's death marked the end of a disturbing chapter in history.

From the ship’s hold, 102 passengers poured eagerly onto the deck, pale after 65 days of confinement, longing to see the sky and dry land again. Their arrival in the New World might have gone entirely unnoticed had these immigrants not marked history with a first act that would come to define modern democracy.