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Traditionalist Views of Women: A Little History Lesson
Theological issues relating to women—the texts, the interpretations, the history, the challenges—lie in an area of teaching and thus of academic interest for me. Because seminary degrees cannot shoehorn every single topic into a set number of credit hours, often people looking at deep-dives into history or the history of ideas must go outside of seminary walls to learn chronologies, read the primary documents, and learn social contexts. Such was the case when I took a doctoral course on women’s history. Acknowledging that I taught at a seminary, my professor let me consult with a historian at my own school to create a supplementary reading list. She ran it by…
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Women: Time for an Update
Women in Church History Last week a friend told me that in one of her seminary summer school classes a fellow student insisted the existence of Christian women in public ministry started with radical feminism. And the professor did not seem to realize what the student said was untrue. I hear such statements often. Here’s one from a Christian blogger: “It was the feminist teachings of the past few decades that first spurred Christians to try to argue for [women in public ministry]. Like it or not, the two schools of thought are intertwined.” Maybe we get the idea that radical feminism started it all because we don’t realize how…
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How Do We Love God with Our Whole Minds?
Today, I’m happy to feature as my guest columnist Ver-lee Cheneweth, my intern for the past year. You might remember meeting her last August when she shared about her journey relating to racism. During Texas’s February 2021 snowmageddon, all schools, including the seminary I attend, closed for a week. Doing schoolwork in subzero weather was ridiculous, so I chucked it for some recreational reading. Obviously, enjoying a compelling book snuggled beneath a downy comforter was the only sane way to pass the time unvexed. After reading Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, however, I fumed, saying, “Dang it! What the heck is wrong with us? Why can’t evangelicals think…
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Breonna Taylor-The Tip of the Iceberg
Breonna Taylor- her name keeps playing over and over in my head. Yes, there have been many names to say throughout the last couple of years. But something about this name, a young black woman much like myself, only a stone’s throw away from my hometown, hits differently. Shot and killed by a police officer in her home, #JusticeforBreonna has made international news. Even though one officer involved in the shooting has been indicted, the ripple effect of a collective groan of exhaustion continues. I am not here to argue the facts and figures of this case, I am simply here to lament, as a sister in Christ and I…
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History is Awesome!!!
Who out there is a history buff? I love to watch, read or listen to history shows, books or lectures about history. What we do and have done as people fascinates me. The human race has been so good and yet so bad. From the fall of man to present day, history proves that God’s prized creation is simply sinful and flawed. Decisions made by man throughout history have always proven to be less than perfect but perfectly human. The reason, I’m bringing up history is because unfortunately, history is something the younger generation has no concept of and that’s so sad. It’s also not good for this country, the people in it or the kids…
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You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat It Too
We have all heard the saying, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too,” but most of us don’t really live like we believe it. There are so many areas of our life where we try to live life without any consequence. That is after all the implication. If you eat the cake now, the end consequence is that you won’t have it later. Could there be an area of greater need to believe this truth than the area of our imaginations? I think not. Imagination is a wonderful gift from God. It is the place where most of us live. Ted Dekker, in his book, The Slumber of…
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Another Woman of the Reformation: Katharina Zell
A sixteenth-century German, Katharina Schütz Zell (1497/8–1562) was one of the first Protestant women to marry a clergyman. Katharina lived all of her life in what was formerly Alsace, known today as Strasbourg, France, close to the border of Germany. A Reformer, she published a collection of congregational hymns, cared for the sick and imprisoned, and reached out to refugees displaced by religious warfare. Matthew Zell, one of the priests in her community who researched the ideas Martin Luther was speaking about in 1521, began preaching about "grace alone." Katharina found solace in the message that God’s salvation is purely a gift through the grace of Christ. They married, which…
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Art Saves Lives
I just finished reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. The student who brought me the book also sent me a link to a transcript in which the author told about his 97-year-old cousin, Helen, a Polish Holocaust survivor: “She started telling me this story of how, in the ghetto, they were not allowed books. If you had a book … the Nazis could put a gun to your head and pull the trigger—books were forbidden. And she used to teach under the pretense of having a sewing class . . . a class of about twenty little girls, and they would come in for…
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The Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Part III)
“Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David; such is my gospel” (2 Timothy 2:8). And so we arrive at the final installment of a study looking at the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In part I and part II, I gave the following proofs or reasons why Christians believe in the literal and physical resurrection of Jesus Christ: 1. Jesus predicted his own resurrection. 2. The authors of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, as well as the Apostle Paul in his letters, provide at least five different historic sources about the events. 3. The testimony of eyewitnesses. 4. The testimony of the earliest Christian writings. 5. The…
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The Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Part II)
“[I]f Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead…. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost” (1 Corinthians 15:14-18, NIV 1984). Once again we are examining the foundational cornerstone of Christianity: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. (Click here to read the first part of this study.) The resurrection of Jesus is central to all Christian belief, as…
