I have just finished reading a very 2002 interesting book The Case for Christ, written in Evangelical style by Lee Strobel. One of the chapters was about how Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah, for which Mr....
The whimsical title of this blog post is based on the 1969 book by David Reuben entitled Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). I chose the title because although the Church has its own teaching about...
I suppose I am hardly the first person to notice that the ancient posture for prayer is largely identical to the universal posture of surrender. That is, the ancient posture for prayer consisted of raising both arms and hands to heaven...
Recently I was re-reading a good but somewhat dated book about the episcopate, entitled The Apostolic Ministry, a collection of essays edited by Bishop Kenneth Kirk and published 1946. In one piece, written by Beatrice Hamilton Thompson...
Recently I have come across an anti-Orthodox polemic which rejects our veneration of icons on the grounds that venerating an image painted on a board of Christ, His Mother, or His saints is contrary to the practice of the apostles and of...
Thousands of years ago when I was a teenager and a brand-new Christian, I happened to read an article by S.G.F. Brandon about Jesus being a Zealot, in which he questioned much if not most of the Gospel portrait of Jesus and suggested...
Recently a minor fracas in the narthex of our church was caused by (I kid you not) my long hair (see inset for a rear view of said hair). Since my hair steadfastly refuses to grow on the top of my head, you would think I could be cut a...
Here’s my (whimsical) guess: somewhere in the Vatican there is a little alarm bell, installed shortly after Jorge Bergoglio became Pope, that sounds every time the Pope puts his theological foot in his mouth. The sounding of the bell...
It has been suggested to me that in many (most?) Evangelical circles one becomes a Christian “by accepting the finished work of Christ”—i.e. by believing and accepting as true that on the cross Jesus paid the full price due our sin and...
I sometimes end up reading books at the request of my parishioners, asking for my opinion of them (such as The Shack by William Young and Love Wins by Rob Bell). That is why I read Bradley Jersak’s A More Christlike God; A More...
Those very familiar with my work may know that I have written commentaries on every book of the New Testament, published by Ancient Faith Publishing as The Bible Study Companion Series. One volume of that series was “The Prison...
In the ongoing debate over the legitimacy of the new so-called “deaconesses” established by some Orthodox in Africa we often hear of “the slippery slope argument”. Some people use the term with approval, insisting that there does indeed...
I am sometimes asked if an Orthodox Christian can have an assurance that he or she will be saved. The question usually comes from my converts from Evangelicalism. They were previously taught that when one is saved, one is given the...
A story is told of the final temptation of Christ. Satan had been trying to tempt Jesus to sin, to compromise, to abandon His divine mission (see Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13), and according to this story, Satan tried one last time to...
In this final blog post, I would like to conclude my extended look at a Reformed view of predestination. There are certain aspects of it that fly in the face of much Biblical teaching. In classic five-point Calvinism on this...
