the incarnation on The Material World

By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.

God expressed Himself J.B. Phillips paraphrases the first line of John 1:1, “At the beginning  God expressed himself ”. God’s word is more than mere speech. His word is action. When God speaks in Gen...

Preaching Commentary God expressed Himself J.B. Phillips paraphrases the first line of John 1:1, “At the beginning  God expressed himself ”. God’s word is more than mere speech. His word is action....

Ancient lens What's the historical context? Couldn’t See That Coming Powerful parents with a family pedigree derived from Judah and the Davidic line was the common narrative for how most peop...

Ancient lens What's the historical context? Longing created by exile For the Israelites, who escaped enslavement and exile in Egypt, the experience at Mt. Sinai in Exodus 19 was formative. It...

Advent 2023: Make Some Noise! AIM commentary Ancient lens What's the historical context? Couldn’t See That Coming Powerful parents with a family pedigree derived from Judah and the David...

Advent 2020: Tear Down the Heavens Tear Down the Heavens Updated & expanded for 2023 AIM commentary Ancient lens What's the historical context? Longing created by exile For the...

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty. Darkness was on the surface of the deep. And God’s Spirit was hovering over the surface of the waters. In ...

The earth is at the same time mother. She is mother of all that is natural, mother of all that is human. She is mother of all, for contained in her are the seeds of all. The earth of human kind contai...

Ancient Lens What's the historical context? A Hard Saying The difficulty of this saying was used by opponents of the early Christians to justify persecution, yet the early church still rallie...

Ancient Lens What's the historical context? A Hard Saying The difficulty of this saying was used by opponents of the early Christians to justify persecution, yet the early church still rallie...

When we turn toward Advent, the name on our lips is Emmanuel, God with us . So much in Christian faith relies on what the faithful actually mean when we say that name. Western Christianity has fo...

The ways Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing disembodied, nothing abstract, nothing impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular and local. The ways em...

The Christian faith always has to do with flesh and blood, time and space, more specifically with your flesh and blood and mine, with the time and space that day by day we are all of us involved with,...

Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body ...

The Cave One of the most famous passages in Plato's Republic is his "Allegory of the Cave," which is found at the beginning of book seven . Socrates imagines the human condition al...

Christmas in May I’m pretty sure it was Stephen Covey, back in the day ( The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People ) who originally said, “The main thing is to let the main thing be the main thing...

Check out our video discussion of the text with Austin D. Hill & Stu Strachan. Click here to view! The small size of Bethlehem reminds one of a common biblical theme: When God is about to do ...

Long since on Mars and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and both from fact was purely terrestrial-was part and parce...

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. . . . ...

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, inso...

In former times, God, who is without form or body, could never be depicted. But now when God is seen in the flesh conversing with men, I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter; I...

Let him into the mire and muck of our world. For only if we let him in can he pull us out.

The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.

[I] try to get into their world a little bit [by listening to hip-hop], because if they’re only adapting to you and you’re not adapting to them in some way, I don’t think you’ve developed a relationsh...

Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body ...

Man's maker was made man that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother's breast; that the Bread might hunger, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired on its journey; th...

Ancient lens What's the historical context? Living as Captives Our text today matches, at least in part, last week’s lectionary passage (Isaiah 40). Just as in Isaiah 40, a message of comfort...

If the phrase “theology of the body” seems odd, perhaps it’s because we haven’t taken the reality of the incarnation as seriously as Scripture does. There’s nothing surprising about looking to the hum...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Ark of God The ark of God traveled with the people of Israel on their journey through the wilderness, accompanied them on their conques...