Religion

It was the first time most Christians had heard of the Gnostics— communities of Christians who lived between the 2nd and 4th centuries and whose scriptures and spiritual beliefs bore little resemblance to what is now considered traditional Christianity.

Jesus’s unpredictability is one of His most memorable traits—one that was, however, not born out of an extraordinary speculative intelligence, but out of such a different perspective on reality that even the most trained and educated thinkers could not foresee it. Therefore, Jesus’s unpredictability says more about us than about Him.

“Born in a home where the scant necessities of life were luxuries, when he left the world for heavenly scenes of labour, he bequeathed it his possessions–two silver spoons, a silver teapot, a well-worn frock coat the Methodist Church”[1] Basil Miller

At the end of a journey tracing how the belief and hope in the Second Coming of Jesus have manifested themselves in the two-thousand-year history of Christianity, the final part of The Second Coming Files presents the remaining elements that link that history to the present day: the Millerite movement and Adventism.

From my experience and the conversations I have had so far, I have found that there are two major categories of people who come to doubt the existence of God.

Seventh-day Adventists have the deep conviction that Jesus Christ will soon return, and the desire to keep His commandments as they were originally written in the Decalogue.

Hendel Butoy was born in Brazil and raised in southern California. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts, and was then offered a position as an animator at Walt Disney in 1979.

I have always been fascinated by God. And yet, I believe I could have known Him far better—much more deeply—if only I had better understood what He sought to teach me each day, including through my neighbour.

Let me paint you a picture of Esther Moo’s life, one of approximately 1959 Karen refugees who migrated to Australia between 2009 and 2010.

An old Romanian proverb states that craft is like a golden bracelet. But the way we relate to this type of jewellery seems to suggest that these golden bracelets are more like some socially acceptable handcuffs, which we fooled ourselves into wearing with pride.

Any large-scale phenomenon, such as a pandemic, activates our instinct to preserve our state of being—especially when we feel like we are losing it.

Trust in God gives clarity to our thinking, so God asks us not to be obsessed with justice, but to be concerned with and delighted by grace.

When the Scottish reformer John Knox, Calvin’s disciple, wrote in 1560 in favour of the death penalty for heretics, he was attacking Sebastian Castellio in particular. John Knox did not know then that he was attacking the father of the idea of ​​religious freedom in Christianity.

I was born into an Adventist family. This meant feeling that pretty much everything I knew, including my religious tradition, was the sole truth.

''The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, 'You have plenty of grain...