A Traveling Theology

(Monothelitism, part 3 – how it ends – see part 1 and part 2)               “Therefore, my beloved ones, the end- times have arrived,” wrote one anonymous Byzantine in the 640’s (Homily on the End-Times, trans. Shoemaker). But wait, you should be saying, I thought we already did this back in 614. The end times were…

(Monothelitism, Part 2 of 3) For the context and my first post on Monothelitism, see here.             As far as the Romans were concerned, there was more than an incidental connection between the divine and mundane boundaries of the roman empire: God had, in fact, revealed the proper boundaries of the empire to Constantius II…

(Monothelitism, Part 1 – The Context) Many people who have studied the history of Christianity have never heard of Monothelitism or the Monothelite Controversy. My students in Church History at Duke skip right over it. At Princeton Seminary, Church History didn’t mention it. I tutored a student at Yale, it wasn’t on their syllabus either.…

So many of my friends were long dead before I was ever born. I interact with them through their words, left behind. Some of them are mysteries: their treasures, their thoughts, might come down to us with no realistic name attached. Some of them left copious notes, thousands of pages, which I will never finish…

The Hard Journey to Heaven, according to Jacob of Serugh (Part 1) Many people are familiar with the harrowing and adventure-filled story of Elijah in 1 Kings. King Ahab of Israel marries Jezebel, and then BOOM, Elijah shows up: Now Elijah the Tishbite, of Tishbite in Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the Lord the God…

I’m waiting for a courier to deliver my passport (and maybe my wallet too?) to a hotel room in the middle of Lisbon. It’s the first time I have ever been properly stranded: no passport, no driver’s license, no credit cards, no insurance cards, no phone that works internationally. I’m still not entirely sure how…

Summer in the Arctic In the last chapter of the last book, there is vision of a completely changed world. John of Patomos writes in Revelation 22:1-5: 1Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 through the middle of the…

The Life of Adam and Eve 🍎 Genesis’s account of what happens to Adam and Eve directly after they are cursed for eating forbidden fruit is tantalizingly sparse. Genesis 3:20 – 24, the entire section between the curse and the conception of Cain, already east of Eden, reads: 20 The man named his wife Eve…

When people think of the Holocaust, one man comes to mind: Adolf Hitler. But, as Hannah Arendt argues in her 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, the Final Solution was not just orchestrated by Hitler or the Nazi Party. It relied on the compliancy and lack of resistance by citizens…

*Dwight L. Moody and Jacob of Serugh*             In The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, Daniel G. Hummel lucidly explains the difficult topic of American end-times theology. And, as Hummel shows, before there was Left Behind, particular beliefs about end-times theology were popularized by the incredibly influential revivalist of the Reconstruction, Dwight L. Moody (d.…