thought exercise on Descent

In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to reca...

Descents are everywhere. From Hercules and Orpheus venturing into Hades, to Harry Potter following the pipes down into the Chamber of Secrets, to the Sheriff and Joyce Byers frantically searching for ...

Christ descended into Hades so that you and I would not have to. Christ descended to Hades so that we might ascend to heaven. Christ entered the realm of death, the realm of the strong enemy, and came...

Charles Spurgeon related a trip through the Lake District, when a dense fog descended on him and his fellow travelers, “we felt ourselves to be transported into a world of mystery where everything was...

“When the plane leveled off at 14,500 feet, Joan Murray took a deep breath and jumped out the door. The bank executive from Charlotte, North Carolina, was enjoying her free fall through the air until ...

Some skeptics today speak about “evolving” from a primitive condition, but the Bible (Romans 1:18-32) sadly portrays a  descent  rather than an ascent. The result has been given the theological term “...

The symbol of judgment and death, the serpent, is lifted up as Israel’s symbol of life. Jesus draws this parallel for us in John, hinting toward the way the tool of Roman execution, the cross, will be...

Paul’s term for the return of Jesus is called the parousia. Parousia was used to describe an imperial visit by a king to a city. People would send a delegation outside the city gates to greet the dign...

The African Methodist Episcopal Church began when Richard Allen and Absalom Jones demanded an equal place in the Methodist Episcopal Church and were refused. In their preaching and teaching, jus...

In Elie Wiesel’s Night , Eliezer is a Jewish teenager, a devoted student of the Talmud from Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupied Hungary. Increasingly repressi...

Serious attention paid to the themes of the season following the Feast of the Epiphany, in particular, can be a strong antidote to a weak Christology. To be sure, all of the church calendar is formed ...

In 1882—seven years before his descent into madness—Friedrich Nietzsche published a parable called The Madman . In the parable, a madman comes into a village on a bright, sunny morning holding al...

The term patrilineal has to do with tracing ancestral descent (and therefore tribal affiliation and inheritance) through the male line. In Israel the possessions of a particular lineage were carefully...

The Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy is going to fall. Scientists travel yearly to measure the building’s slow descent. They report that the 179-foot tower moves about one-twentieth of an inch a year, a...

Sleep reminds us of our helplessness. Asleep, we have nothing to commend us; we accomplish nothing to put on our resume. Because of this, sleep is a counter-formative practice that reminds us that our...

It was a cold December weekend in Chicago, and I was excited. One of my best friends was getting married, and to top it off, he had asked me to officiate the wedding. I was honored by the invitation, ...

What, as Christians, can we say to those who face death, either their own or that of their loved ones? We certainly can give them the hope of Christ’s resurrection, if they or their loved one has trus...

C.S. Lewis on the Incarnation: We catch sight of a new key principle—the power of the Higher, just in so far as it is truly Higher, to come down, the power of the greater to include the less. . . . ...

When I graduated from college I was given one of the greatest opportunities of my young life. A group of my friends were told that if we were able to purchase a flight to the Cayman Islands, we would ...

On May 1, 2023, a small aircraft carrying seven passengers crashed deep in the Amazon rainforest, one of the most remote regions on Earth. The Cessna had been flying between two villages in southern C...

Entering the wilderness is a larger metaphor for dealing with our own demons, our own motivations, be they good or bad. In this short excerpt, Annie Dillard shares the value of entering the wilderness...

My entry into solitude often feels like the hard landing of an aircraft that this flight attendant humorously describes: “Ladies and gentlemen, please remain in your seats until Captain Crash and the ...

One of the movements in the rhythm of discipleship and sanctification is the movement of dying. The practice of confession is where the “dying” of conversion repeatedly occurs. We come as though to th...

With the recent release of a new installment in the Indiana Jones movie series, our family decided to re-watch the original trilogy (I like to act as though Kingdom of the Crystal Skull never existe...

A climber recently had to be airlifted off Japan’s Mount Fuji due to altitude sickness. That alone would have been a dramatic enough story. But four days later—still recovering—he climbed back up ...

I am told that when SAS soldiers parachute into unknown territory they are trained to pause before moving. They must first get their bearings and only then set out for their destination. That is wise ...

Entering the wilderness is a larger metaphor for dealing with our own demons, our own motivations, be they good or bad. In this short excerpt, Annie Dillard shares the value of entering the wilderness...

One of the most critically acclaimed fantasy films in recent years was a piece of science fiction called Arrival . It is the story of beings from outer space who arrive on earth, igniting a wildfire ...

In his excellent book on the desert fathers, Where God Happens , former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams tells of an encounter between two monastic fathers. The first was Macarius, famous in...

Experienced mountaineers have a quiet, regular, short step—on the level it looks petty; but then this step they keep up, on and on as they ascend, whilst the inexperienced townsman hurries along, and ...