Augustine’s work Confessions is one of his major works, and includes not only timeless wisdom comparing this world to the kingdom that is coming, it introduces such imporant concepts as original sin, the timelessness of God, and our disordered loves.
1. Thagaste: The Childhood of Augustine One of the most important influences on any human being is the character and quality of their parents and childhood experience. As the child of a fairly well-to-do Italian family in a northern-African outpost of the Roman Empire, Augustine...
In Evangelical circles, self-love is an idea and practice often viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility, most often being equated with selfishness. Little distinction is made between an unhealthy self-focus and a possibly healthy, biblical self-love. In Christian circles, the biblical and evidential need...
Therefore, let us leave the elementary teaching about Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works, faith in God, teaching about ritual washings, laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. (Hebrews 6:1-2...
The Triadic (a.k.a. “tripartite”) model of Biblical anthropology declares that humans are composed of three distinct parts – spirit, soul, and body (1 Thes. 5:23). The New Testament uses the Greek words psyche (soul) and pneuma (spirit) to describe discreet parts of the human with...
In Created in God’s Image (1994), Anthony Hoekema (1913-1988) appraises Biblical anthropology in a comprehensive way, but also brings to light modern thinking on the areas that continue to develop or remain contentious. In doing so, he opens up the student of scripture to important...
The current majority view in evangelical Christendom regarding the makeup of man is dualism, that is, two components, the physical (body) and the immaterial (soul or spirit). This view, however, is currently finding challenge from an anthropological monist, or physicalist view, as well as the...
Alvin Plantinga is a modern luminary of philosophy, known especially for his successful defeater for the logical problem of evil, a truly historic achievement in philosophy, and a significant undermining of the most formidable possible defeater to faith in the Christian concept of God (Catholicism,...
