Tag: Interfaith exchange

JERALD F. DIRKS’ slim 64-page volume, A Concise Introduction to Islam (Amana Publications, 2014) makes available a quick appetizer for the busy modern non-Muslim who knows about Islam only what is being propagated in the mainstream media. In Part 1 we appraised…

Using Richard E. Rubenstein’s book, When Jesus Became God, The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome, we have introduced the 4th century theological dispute in Alexandria, Egypt, featuring Arius vs. Athanasius, a controversy that would develop and continue…

We return to retelling the story of the 4th century Church’s theological exploits, following Richard E. Rubenstein’s book, When Jesus Became God, The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome; page numbers refer to material taken from this work.…

HOW DID JESUS become defined as ‘God’? Beginning with this installment, we travel back to the 4th century of the Christian Era (ce) and observe the proceedings of Christian authorities. These events account for a bellwether stage in the historical legacy left…

We ended our previous Part 6 noting that if the Church had not accepted Paul as a valid spokesman for Jesus, then a “Christological” belief system—including the supposed divinity of Jesus, a divine son-ship relationship to God, a Trinitarian model of deity—could…

WE HAVE BEEN looking at Dr. James D. G. Dunn’s study of the use of words in the Christian New Testament (NT) (compared with Hebrew/ Jewish usage in the Old Testament—since Jesus conformed to the model of a Jewish prophet), words meaning “worship”—as…

As a means toward interfaith understanding of Islam’s vindication and re-establishment of true monotheism among the Heavenly Revelations, we are analyzing James D. G. Dunn’s arguments in his book Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? The New Testament Evidence. Dunn is a British New Testament…

Mainline Christians today speak of the One God as consisting of three ‘persons’: ‘Father,’ ‘Son,’ and ‘Holy Spirit’—a doctrinal explanation hammered out by the institutional Church but found nowhere as such in Christian Scriptures. How is it that a major Christian doctrine…