Theology

The effect or influence that a particular thing has on us depends largely on where that thing falls on the scale of our values. It's one thing to lose your folding fan in a foreign country and quite another to lose your passport.

Courage is not the opposite of fear, nor of caution. True courage is what you do right in the midst of fear.

When we read the Gospels, we may be put off by the way Jesus Christ interprets the Hebrew Scriptures.

When the fear of war overwhelms our thoughts, let us not forget that we are not alone, that God will end our suffering and give us a new and everlasting life.

From the temple in Jerusalem to the final pages of Revelation, the Bible points toward a future where God finishes what He started.

An ordinary wooden chair is a metaphor that’s often used to talk about the key dynamics of faith. But it’s worth exploring further. Perhaps we could describe this as a process of developing the theory of a chair.

Perhaps the greatest mystery for Christians is the incarnation of God, described in the words of the apostle John, an eyewitness to the life of Jesus: "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14).

Back when I was a student, I heard this joke that, despite being funny, made me stop and think. It went something like this: a man starts hearing an "inner voice" telling him to sell his house, move to Bucharest, and use all the money to bet on a black 13 at roulette. The man complies without question because the voice spoke with...

We carry sad stories with us, and the meaning of these stories often eludes us. What if we discovered that these stories provide unique opportunities to change lives? Cori Salchert discovered, through family tragedy, the resolve and desire to take care of children with terminal illnesses.

Nothing can prepare us in advance for the suffering we will experience in this life. But even knowing this, we often remember with guilt the moments of blissful ignorance we had before suffering hit us.

Some expectations dissolve into routine or turn into despair, while others invigorate life. The former are measured in deeds and desires, while the latter are measured in faithfulness and beliefs.

Jesus's words could not have been foreign to the Jewish people of His day. In an eminently oral culture, narratives, stories, parables and metaphors occupied an important place.

A fulfilled life is built on the foundation of faith and the desire to imitate the character of God, in a world conceptualised around the truth.

The metaphor of the church as a hospital is so popular in the neo-Protestant milieu that it seems to highlight the hypocrisy of those attending church services even more. That’s what I used to believe until one day when I witnessed the opposite with my very own eyes.

In the first part of this series, we familiarised ourselves with the classical Protestant perception of the concept and prophetic figure of the Antichrist, and evaluated the classical identification of the Antichrist with the papacy. Further analysis becomes even more intriguing with a close reading of the major biblical prophecies about the Antichrist.