The Wandering Heretic

The first part of this post covered the error of considering Israelites (whether in the Land of Israel or not) as somehow superior to Gentile believers in the New Covenant. The second part of this topic covers the equally unbalanced swing of the pendulum: that of ignoring or belittling of Israel and of the [...]

 
Finishing up the “World Religion” cruise.

While doing internet research for my series on Romans and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, I somehow ended up at the Asia Times website. There I encountered an internet columnist who writes under the pen name of Oswald Spengler. The original Oswald Spencer was the writer of The Decline of the West. [...]

There are two false doctrines that are circulating in modern American Protestant Christianity. The first error is the primacy that many Christians give to Jews in general and those that occupy the Land of Israel in particular. The second error is to ignore the writings of the Tanakh (or Old Testament) entirely, claiming that [...]

Publishing is a curious business. Frank Viola has written a book entitled Pagan Christianity in which he contends that many of the common practices of the modern church have their origins more in Paganism than in early Christianity. This is not the curious part; many people from Mormonism to Muslimism have made similar [...]

I just found out that my upgrade to Wordpress caused one of my stats plug-ins to hang my website. No one was able to post comments for the last few weeks even if they wanted to. Even loading my site was an issue in some cases. The problem was, that since I [...]

I have reached the end of my survey of the 11th chapter of Romans. The chapter is the culmination of Paul’s express desire to reconcile believing Jew and Gentile together into one Body. Paul then noted that even unbelieving Israel was part of his motivation to convert the Gentiles. He hoped that [...]

 
Continuing on the “World Religion” cruise.

As noted in the previous post, Paul has proclaimed that God was forming a new body to work in the world for His glory. This new body (or nation) was composed of Gentiles grafted into the faithful remnant of Israel. In it, God was reconciling all the [formerly] disobedient, Jew and Gentile alike, [...]

I now reach the end of Chapter 11 of Paul’s letter to the Romans. However, before I do, I want to lay out some historical groundwork on how this epistle was written. Many assume that Paul wrote a systematized theology with Romans as he spelled out and defended his theology to a church [...]