Alpha University

There are a bazillion little catch phrases that we use this time of year to direct our focus where it should be. “Jesus is the reason for the season” gains quite a bit of traction with each Christmas season as we endeavor to prevent the busyness of November and December from steamrolling our lives. And […]

What an amazing way to start a Gospel—with a great long list of names! But, to Jews, that was not surprising at all, as we shall see. It sets Jesus of Nazareth in the context of what God had been doing for his people from the earliest days. It ushers in the theme of fulfilment,

In many parts of the world, people once lived their entire lives without even meeting a follower of another religion. Today, globalization, fueled by migration, politics, economics, and the Internet, has brought awareness of other faiths to most of earth’s population. Understanding the “global village” is impossible without some grasp of the religious beliefs that

The principal crime of the human race, the highest guilt charged upon the world, the whole procuring cause of judgment, is idolatry. For, although each single fault retains its own proper feature, although it is destined to judgment under its own proper name also, yet it is marked off under the general account of idolatry.

The Council of Chalcedon was the culmination of defining the nature of Christ and the turning point of church history. The foundation of Christian doctrine of the Trinity dictates that God is one God, but three persons, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. This pivotal event took place in 451, modern Kadikoy, Turkey and

Tertullian’s writings sound the rigorist strains which will become the themes of North African Christianity throughout its entire subsequent history in antiquity (cf. Frend 1965; 1985): Christianity as the nova lex; the centrality of God as lawgiver and judge; fear of God as the foundation of salvation; the “gathered” or “pure” notion of the Church