This year there have been quite a significant number of deaths from murders, accidents and diseases like its never been witnessed before in my country. Every week I read on the newspaper that a couple fought and someone was killed or a celebrity died. I think this could be a birth pang described by Jesus in the gospel. Is there any Biblical basis that suggests murderous feelings will increase as the end draws near?

I'm referring to T.M. Luhrmann's book *[When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God](https://www.amazon.com/When-God-Talks-Back-Understanding/dp/0307277275)* . The book's synopsis states: > A bold approach to understanding the American evangelical experience from an anthropological and psychological perspective by one of the country's most prominent anthropologists. > > Through a series of intimate, illuminating interviews with various members of the Vineyard, an evangelical church with hundreds of congregations across the country, Tanya Luhrmann leaps into the heart of evangelical faith. Combined with scientific research that studies the effect that intensely practiced prayer can have on the mind, When God Talks Back examines how normal, sensible people—from college students to accountants to housewives, all functioning perfectly well within our society—can attest to having the signs and wonders of the supernatural become as quotidian and as ordinary as laundry. Astute, sensitive, and extraordinarily measured in its approach to the interface between science and religion, Luhrmann's book is sure to generate as much conversation as it will praise. Have Evangelical Christians published reviews of this book? If so, how do they respond to the way Luhrmann describes and theorizes about their relationship with God? --- **Appendix - A big quote from *When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God*, Kindle Edition** > I grew up among all these good people whom I loved, and I saw that some of them took there to be something in the world that the others did not see, and their mutual incomprehension seemed deeper and more powerful than just knowing different information about the world. Later on, when I became a professor and taught a seminar on divinity and spirituality, I saw again the blank incomprehension that had startled me when I was young—decent, smart, empathic people who seemed to stare at each other across an abyss. **The skeptics did not understand the believers, and the believers did not understand the skeptics. They did not even know how to get from here to there.** > > **I set out many years ago to understand how God becomes real for modern people. I chose an example of the style of Christianity that would seem to make the cognitive burden of belief most difficult: the evangelical Christianity in which God is thought to be present as a person in someone’s everyday life, and in which God’s supernatural power is thought to be immediately accessible by that person**. The Vineyard Christian Fellowship is a new denomination, a few decades old, and it represents this shift in the American imagination of God. These Christians speak as if God interacts with them like a friend. He speaks to them. He listens to them. He acts when they pray to him about little mundane things, because he cares. **This kind of Christianity seems almost absurdly vivid to someone who grew up in a mainstream Protestant church**; when I first encountered it, I imagined that people thought of God as if he were a supernatural buddy with a thunderbolt. > > The Americans in this church are ordinary Americans. They are typically middle class, but one finds very wealthy and very poor people in the congregations. They are typically white, but the congregations include many minorities. Most participants are college-educated. The church took form in California, but there are now more than six hundred churches across the country and as many as fifteen hundred around the world. The Vineyard is arguably the most successful example of what one sociologist has called new paradigm Protestantism, the infusion of a more intensely expressive spirituality into white, middle-class Christianity. **This style of spirituality has also been called neo-Pentecostal because it represents the adoption of a Pentecostal ethos, and its flamboyant emphasis on the direct experience of God, into a form acceptable to the white mainstream**. Another name is renewalist. According to a recent survey, nearly one-quarter of all Americans embrace a Christian spirituality in which congregants experience God immediately, directly, and personally. The Vineyard typifies this powerful new impulse in American spirituality. > > For over two years, I went to weekly services at a Vineyard in Chicago, attended local conferences and special worship sessions, joined a weekly house group for a year, and formally interviewed more than thirty members of the church about their experience of God. That is the anthropological method: we anthropologists learn, or at least we try to learn, from the inside out. We observe, we participate, and we converse, for hours and hours on end. After several years in Chicago, I moved to California and found another Vineyard to join. Again I joined a small group that met weekly, and again I went to conferences and retreats, and I interviewed congregants willing to talk to me about God. I was there for over two years. Members of these churches became my friends and confidants. I liked them. I thought they liked me. They knew I was an anthropologist, and as they came to know me, they became comfortable talking with me at length about God. I have sought to understand what they said. > > **What I have to offer is an account of how you get from here to there**. The tool of an anthropologist’s trade is careful observation—participant observation, a kind of naturalist’s craft in which one watches what people do and listens to what they say and infers from that how they come to see and know their world. I am, more precisely, a psychological anthropologist: I add to my toolkit the experimental method of the psychologist, which I use to explore the constraints on the way people make meaning. At one point I ran a psychological experiment, to test whether my hunch that spiritual practice had an impact on the mind’s process was true. (It was.) But mostly I watched and I listened, and I tried to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical world was able to experience God as real. > > It didn’t have much to do with belief per se. Skeptics sometimes imagine that becoming a religious believer means acquiring a belief the way you acquire a new piece of furniture. You decide you need a table for the living room, so you purchase it and get it delivered and then you have to rearrange everything, but once it’s done, it’s done. **I did not find that being or becoming a Christian was very much like that. The propositional commitment that there is a God—the belief itself—is of course important. In some ways it changes everything, and the furniture of the mind is indeed distinctively rearranged. But for the people I spent time with, learning to know God as real was a slow process, stumbling and gradual, like learning to speak a foreign language in an unfamiliar country, with new and different social cues.** > > **In fact, what I saw was that coming to a committed belief in God was more like learning to do something than to think something. I would describe what I saw as a theory of attentional learning—that the way you learn to pay attention determines your experience of God. More precisely, I will argue that people learn specific ways of attending to their minds and their emotions to find evidence of God, and that both what they attend to and how they attend changes their experience of their minds, and that as a result, they begin to experience a real, external, interacting living presence**. > > **In effect, people train the mind in such a way that they experience part of their mind as the presence of God**. **They learn to reinterpret the familiar experiences of their own minds and bodies as not being their own at all—but God’s. They learn to identify some thoughts as God’s voice, some images as God’s suggestions, some sensations as God’s touch or the response to his nearness. They construct God’s interactions out of these personal mental events, mapping the abstract concept “God” out of their mental awareness into a being they imagine and reimagine in ways shaped by the Bible and encouraged by their church community**. **They learn to shift the way they scan their worlds, always searching for a mark of God’s presence, chastening the unruly mind if it stubbornly insists that there is nothing there. Then they turn around and allow this sense of God—an external being they find internally in their minds—to discipline their thoughts and emotions. They allow the God they learn to experience in their minds to persuade them that an external God looks after them and loves them unconditionally.** > > **To do this, they need to develop a new theory of mind**. That phrase—theory of mind—has been used to describe the way a child learns to understand that other people have different beliefs and goals and intentions. The child learns that people have minds, and that not everything the child knows in his or her mind is known by other people. Christians must also learn new things about their minds. **After all, to become a committed Christian one must learn to override three basic features of human psychology: that minds are private, that persons are visible, and that love is conditional and contingent upon right behavior.** These psychological expectations are fundamental. To override them without going mad, people must develop a way of being in the world that is able to sustain the violations in relation to God—but not other humans. They do it by paying attention to their minds in new ways. They imagine their minds differently, and they give significance to thoughts and feelings in new ways. > > **These practices work. They change people. That is, they change mental experience, and those changes help people to experience God as more real. The practices don’t work for everyone, and they do not work for each person to the same extent, but there are real skills involved here, skills that develop a psychological capacity called *absorption* that perhaps evolved for unrelated reasons, but that helps the Christian to experience that which is not materially present. These skills and practices make what is absent to the senses present in the mind**. > > To say this is not to say that God is an illusion. I am pointing out the obvious: that the supernatural has no natural body to see, hear, or smell. To know God, these Christians school their minds and senses so that they are able to experience the supernatural in ways that give them more confidence that what their sacred books say is really true. > > *Luhrmann, T.M.. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.*

*Let me preface my question by saying that my knowledge of the Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) position on the future of ethnic Jews is limited. Perhaps that position has been fully fleshed out and explained somewhere, and I just failed to find it. If you can post a link or resource that thus makes answering my question unnecessary, feel free to do so. Likewise, if my understanding of the SDA position on the subject (as stated below) is inaccurate, please feel free to correct it before (or even instead of) answering the question.* Based on my knowledge/understanding of the SDA position on the subject, Adventists believe that: 1. Jews will **not** be saved "as a nation" (although **individual** Jews will be saved, as the Jews irreversibly lost their position as a "people of God" when they rejected their Messiah by giving up Jesus to be crucified under Pontius Pilate and failed to repent of that rejection during the apostolic ministry of the first century, the Jewish nation was consequently rejected by God which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70 and scattering of the Jews among the nations in fulfillment of Daniel 9:26); 2. The blessing of being a "people/nation of God" was essentially "transferred" (though a different, "weaker" verb may be used here) to the Church of Jesus Christ where a person's ethnic background is no longer a factor in anything that has to do with obtaining/enjoying any special spiritual blessing or prophetic distinction. In other words, being a Jew (following national Jewish rejection that occurred nearly two millennia ago) makes no difference thenceforth (either now or in the future) as far as God's Kingdom in general and the economy of salvation in particular is concerned. While I can readily see *qualified* scriptural support for the second position (e.g., Paul's words "**There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus**," Galatians 3:28) — "qualified" because I think that most Christians who would quote this verse here would also disagree with the kind of interpretation of this and similar verses that obliterates the distinctions of "biological sex," "social-economic status," or "ethnic background" as such — I'm having a hard time reconciling the first position with the rest of the teaching of the Bible. - For one, the Ap. Paul himself seems to believe in a "reversal" of the rejection of the Jews that is to "follow" salvation of the "fullness" of the Gentiles. Important, he does so by relying on and even quoting some OT prophecies (like those in Hosea and Amos) applying them to "latter days" in the earth's history. In Romans (11:25-31) he writes: >**For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: for this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins. As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers’ sakes. For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. For as ye in times past have not believed God, yet have now obtained mercy through their unbelief: even so have these also now not believed, that through your mercy they also may obtain mercy. For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all.** - Further, the book of the Revelation — which SDA is usually big on expounding (except perhaps on this point) — that relates, according to SDA own beliefs, many **future** events makes repeated references to both "Jews" and "Gentiles" which would make it at least somewhat illogical to hold that the ethnic distinctions between the two were obliterated to the point of complete obsolescence, as SDA seems to hold (at least as it pertains to matters spiritual). For example, when John records the famous scene of the 144,000, their tribal affiliation is painstakingly included — though the order and the composition of the list differ from other renditions of the list, a separate issue — and, in our view, cannot be simply disregarded as "poetical" or "allegorical" language (Revelation 7:2-8): >**And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God: and he cried with a loud voice to the four angels, to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea, saying, Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads. And I heard the number of them which were sealed: and there were sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel. Of the tribe of Juda were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Reuben were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Gad were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Aser were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Nepthalim were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Manasses were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Simeon were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Levi were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Issachar were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Zabulon were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Joseph were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Benjamin were sealed twelve thousand.** Not only that, following those verses, when the "great multitude" is described, their "ethnic" (meaning "non-Jewish" in light of the previous verse) background is also explicitly noted (Revelation 7:9): >**After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands;** Verses like these in Revelation are in full harmony with eschatological OT passages (like those in Isaiah) that continue to refer to Israel alongside Gentile nations while speaking of what happens in the "end." Needless to say, such references lose meaning if we "spiritualize" the terms "Israel" and "Judah" to mean "multi-ethnic Church." To summarize, it appears that: - Although we can scripturally maintain a certain loss of significance of Jewish ethnic affiliation following the rejection of Jesus Christ and Israel's failure to repent of that act "as a nation" 20 centuries ago, - It seems difficult (if not impossible) to maintain that that loss: a) is permanent and b) has resulted in complete obsolescence of spiritual/prophetic significance of Jewish ethnic background (however we may define it while accounting for the legitimate prospect of a Gentile "becoming a Jew" outlined in the OT scriptures, e.g., Ruth the Moabite) in light of verses that suggest that the rejection of ethnic Jews was to be "temporary" until "fullness of the Gentiles come in" and both "Jews" and "Gentiles" seem to feature (distinctly if not separately) in the future prophetic narrative. I realize that there is a separate issue of "fullness of Gentiles" being come in and "all Israel" being saved that will need to be addressed and reconciled with relevant points of the SDA teaching as well, but I'd leave that for another question. On the final note to this long rendition of my question, I did consult one online SDA resource that seems to acknowledge some of the OT prophecies (obviously relied on by the Ap. Paul) that predict return of the Jews to salvation in the "end days," but such references don't appear to displace the overall SDA belief that goes along with "replacement" theology that the SDA Church (along with many others) otherwise seems to espouse.

If this is so... how do we arrive at today? Without a starting point, time cannot begin to move forward and we would never come to exist. An eternal future is possible but an eternal past is not. There has to be an original creator. Also... are the LDS actually worshipping a created being who was once a regular man? Are other worlds without sin or do they have their own form of Jesus? Or did their man-god find another way to deal with sin and the cross isn't necessary as we would like to think?

Allow me to clearly illustrate the existence of controversy by way of examples. As a first example, consider the book [*Marvels & Miracles: God Wrought in the Ministry for Forty-Five Years*](https://www.amazon.com/Marvels-Miracles-Wrought-Ministry-Forty-Five/dp/1534965351/) , which includes a synopsis featuring an inspiring message for those seeking a deeper relationship with God (bolded): > Often described as the 'Grandmother of the Pentecostal Movement', Maria Woodworth Etter was a figurehead of the early Pentecostal and Charismatic Christian movement. Her ministry would touch hundreds of thousands and eventually through the power of her books, millions. Thousands more would attend her Holy Spirit-filled meetings, bringing the sick, the lame, the possessed and the lost. In those meetings the Holy Spirit would visit in such a powerful way that men and women would "lay like dead" while other would start trembling or speaking in tongues. Marvels and Miracles is Maria's accounts of the marvels and miracles that took place during her ministry. It speaks of her calling, her initial lack of self-belief in being able to follow that calling and the signs and wonders that followed once she had accepted it. **For anyone seeking a deeper relationship with God or for those who are yearning to read about what he is able to do through those who pick up the mantle of faith, Marvels and Miracles promises to show you**. As a second example, consider Jack S. Deere's teachings in his book [*Why I Am Still Surprised by the Voice of God: How God Speaks Today through Prophecies, Dreams, and Visions*](https://www.amazon.com/Surprised-Voice-God-Through-Prophecies-dp-0310108152/dp/0310108152/ref=dp_ob_title_bk) : > Not only does God still speak to us apart from the Scriptures—**we should expect Him to**. > > This is the story of how Jack Deere learned to hear the voice of God in his life **and how you can too**. It’s clear that the ideas promoted by these books would raise some eyebrows among critics like [Jordan Standridge](https://www.gracechurch.org/standridge) from Grace Community Church, who expressed his views at the Cripplegate, where he [wrote](https://thecripplegate.com/three-reasons-god-is-a-cessationist/) : > ### Three Reasons God is a Cessationist > > [...] > > God is not the author of chaos. And that’s the only way to describe what happened in 1914 at the Azusa street revival. For more than 1800 years of church history, God had stopped giving men sign gifts until supposedly He let man out of his box again. This produced speaking in unintelligible languages. It produced unconfirmed and unprovable healings, and, ultimately, turned prophecy into unreliable and fallible statements. It produced women preaching, and all kinds of ecclesiological problems. > > And as we look around today, so many questions arise. As we hear of all the miraculous gifts that are being claimed all over the world, we have to ask ourselves a simple question. Has God taken man out of his “can’t do miracles box” after 1800 years of church history and given them back the abilities that a few people at the beginning of the church age had? If he has, why has he entrusted these TBN money-hungry charlatans with these abilities? However, [J. P. Moreland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._Moreland)—an American philosopher, theologian, Christian apologist, and distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University—would counter with his latest book, [*A Simple Guide to Experience Miracles: Instruction and Inspiration for Living Supernaturally in Christ*](https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Guide-Experience-Miracles-Supernaturally/dp/0310124190) , whose synopsis states: > Does God Still Do Miracles Today? *A Simple Guide to Experience Miracles* will give you confidence in and awareness of the supernatural realm as you learn how to flourish spiritually by experiencing more miraculous interventions in your life and ministry. Internationally renowned philosopher J. P. Moreland looks at the nature of miracles and explains **why bearing and receiving credible testimony to God's miraculous acts is a crucial feature of a mature Jesus-follower**. He also shows how to distinguish a real miracle from a mere coincidence. **Miracles bring comfort to believers, strengthening faith in God and creating boldness in our lives**. In other words, for J. P. Moreland, diving deep into one's relationship with God and maturing as a follower of Jesus means embracing the miraculous aspects of Christian living. However, let’s set aside the controversy surrounding the miraculous for now and let's focus instead on seeking God’s face—a central theme throughout the Bible. GotQuestions explores this in their article titled [*What does it mean to seek God’s face?*](https://www.gotquestions.org/seek-Gods-face.html) , which explains: > The true nature of worship is to seek God’s face. The Christian walk is a life devoted to seeking God’s presence and favor. The Lord wants us to humbly and trustingly seek His face in our prayers and in our times in His Word. It requires intimacy to look intently into someone’s face. **Pursuing God’s face is equivalent to developing an intimate relationship with Him**: “O God, you are my God; I earnestly search for you. My soul thirsts for you; my whole body longs for you in this parched and weary land where there is no water. I have seen you in your sanctuary and gazed upon your power and glory. Your unfailing love is better than life itself; how I praise you!” (Psalm 63:1–3, NLT). > > [...] > > Seeking God’s face means desiring to know His character and wanting Him—**His presence**—more than any other thing He can give us. According to GotQuestions, *seeking God’s face* involves developing an *intimate relationship with God* and pursuing *His presence*. Essentially, one mystery is explained with two mysteries. If we concentrate purely on the aspect of pursuing *God's presence*, one might consider the approach of [Brother Lawrence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Lawrence) , a 17th-century Carmelite friar, who authored the well-known classic of Christian mysticism, [*The Practice of the Presence of God*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_the_Presence_of_God) : > The text attempts to explain Lawrence's method of acquiring the presence of God. A summary of his approach can be gleaned from the following passages. "That he had always been governed by love, without selfish views; and that having resolved to make the love of GOD the end of all his actions, he had found reasons to be well satisfied with his method. That he was pleased when he could take up a straw from the ground for the love of GOD, seeking Him only, and nothing else, not even His gifts." "That in order to form a habit of conversing with GOD continually, and referring all we do to Him; we must at first apply to Him with some diligence: but that after a little care we should find His love inwardly excite us to it without any difficulty." Lawrence pleads that all work is valuable to God and one need not accomplish great things to please Him. The labourer is as valuable to God as the priest. (Note: a comprehensive list of 17th-century Christian mystics is available [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:17th-century_Christian_mystics).) Yet again, someone like John MacArthur, in his sermon [*The Promise of the Holy Spirit, Part 2*](https://www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/43-75/the-promise-of-the-holy-spirit-part-2) , would offer a contrasting viewpoint: > It was a number of years ago now – it’s probably been 20 years or so ago – when I was surprised to see a wave coming into the church under the title *Experiencing* God, *Experiencing* God. If you go to any Christian bookstore over the last 20 years or more, you’re going to find books on experiencing God. There were a couple of Southern Baptist pastors who developed, not only the books, the perspective, but then began to develop curriculum, and more curriculum, and more books; and this literally became an all-encompassing, all-engulfing movement in the evangelical church experiencing God. > > [...] > > **Christian mysticism, through the Middle Ages, and even until now, has always sought to find God in some experience, some feeling, some emotion; some means by which the senses imminence is present. This has become a popular notion in evangelical churches that there are ways in which you can feel God, in which you can sense God’s presence**. > > Perhaps the most popular one is music. If you get the right music, if the music is sort of musically seductive enough and emotionally energized enough, people will say, “I just feel the presence of God. Don’t you feel the presence of God?” > > **Well, of course, that is absolute nonsense. You can’t feel the presence of God. You don’t have any mechanism to feel the presence of God. I’ve never felt the presence of God; I don’t even know what that means.** But I do know this: He’s here. And more than that, He not only inhabits the praise of His people; is joined to His people in union all the time so that the church itself literally is in constant communion with God collectively; it’s not only true that where two or three are gathered together, He is in the midst. But, this is true. --- Why is there such a controversy among Christians over defining core and fundamental aspects of Christian living, **particularly in regard to understanding the nature of a relationship with God and what it entails**, including what Christians can yearn for, aspire to, and expect from such a relationship?

I'm really trying find out more about how the early Church understood Communion, or the Eucharist, or the Lord's Table. One of the crucial aspects (for me) is whether they saw the Eucharist as a sacrifice/oblation (as the Catholic or Eastern-Orthodox do). If the Eucharist truly was a sacrifice, then it follows that the sacrifice takes place on an altar. So the question is does the Bible or any of the early Church writings call the Lord's Table an "altar"? And if not, when/how did the practice emerge?

I do believe that the righteous dead who are having physical disabilities such as being unable to walk, see, hear or talk will be raised whole in the resurrection of the saints which will be the first one. Jesus taught that they will enter into life with their disabilities **Mathew 18:9** >would be better to enter the kingdom of heaven with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the lake of fire Jesus healed these people while he was here on earth, why can't he raise them whole in the resurrection of the saints?

This question is about the liberal versions of Christianity, the versions which don’t have a conception of Hell. Put simply, without Hell, just what exactly is Jesus saving me from? Even the most liberal Christians say that sin is inescapable. So Jesus cannot be saving me from sin. Without Hell, he can’t be saving me from God either. Or the Devil. I really don’t see how a liberal Jesus could be anyone’s personal saviour. --- [Question inspired by Nathaniel in the comments at Slacktivist](http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2015/07/08/i-cant-escape-the-pina-colada-song/) .

How do we know from the Bible that Adam and Eve have been saved from the lake of fire? According to my knowledge, it is a fairly unanimous position among the Oriental Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, and the mainstream Protestantism (I mean those protestants those who directly address Jesus by His name in their prayers) that Adam and Eve are saved and therefore will not go to the lake of fire in future eternity. Usually, this verse is cited: > "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy > seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his > heel." (Genesis 3:15, KJV) However, the language here is rather metaphorical, and to me it looks like an overreach to claim that this verse definitively states that Adam and Eve are saved. So, has there been any attempt within Christianity—I am sure there has—to provide a logical and exhaustive proof from other parts of Scripture, both the Old Testament and the New Testament, that Adam and Eve are saved from the lake of fire?

I understand that term ‘the law’ is often meant by Luther to just mean the ‘covenant of works’ as opposed to ‘the promise’ or ‘covenant of grace’. This covenant of works was naturally most illuminated by the moral commandments of the Mosaic legislation. Therefore Luther and some of those after him (John Owen, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Hodge, etc) refer to ‘the law’ not always as a reference to the ‘Mosaic Law’, but the ‘law of nature’ or ‘conscience’. The question is not about that. I accept that the law of conscience and condemnation of original sin was always applicable to all mankind and still is. However, aside from the different uses of the terms. Strictly speaking, not with respect to the law of nature, or covenant of works, but specifically with respect to the Mosaic Legislation and encapsulated by the ten commandments, was this law of Moses ever an expectation by God on Gentiles, according to Luther? I asked specifically with reference to the ten commandments as the first commandment starts with ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.’, obviously not gentiles. And the commandment to ‘obey the Sabbath’, merges the moral commands with ceremonial and appears never to have been followed by any Gentile group as far as I know. The question is important because Gentiles who may have had faith by hearing about the Promised Messiah before Christ, yet not following the Mosaic Law, going to the temple and obeying the Sabbath, etc. may have been saved by their faith apart from the works of the Mosaic Law. In addition, the example of the Ninevites, having possibly believed in God, though a Gentile nation not following Moses, may have had several justified sinners by faith in their midst? What do the reformers, specifically Luther, say specifically about the Mosaic Legislation on mount Horeb, with respect to Gentile nations?

I have seen that earlier Church fathers such as Tertullian and Origen - among others - were subordinationists. Why are they correct/wrong? I appreciate both biblical and logic arguments.

The Latin phrase Sola Scriptura means “by Scripture alone.” I understand that the phrase Nuda or Solo Scriptura means “Scripture alone.” There is a subtle but important difference and this is what I want to explore. **Sola Scriptura** was a key principle of the Reformation. It asserts that Scripture alone is the supreme authority in all matters of faith and practice. Reformers such as Luther and Calvin established that Scripture is the highest authority, but they also upheld the subordinate importance of historical creeds and confessions. Early church fathers, such as Augustine and Athanasius, affirmed the authority of Scripture while also contributing to theological debate that allowed the church to address heretical doctrines and clarify foundational Christian beliefs. **Nuda, or Solo Scriptura** upholds Scripture as the only authority, dismissing historical creeds, confessions, and biblical traditions as useless and nonbinding. My understanding is that advocates of Nuda or Solo Scriptura believe that the Bible should be interpreted apart from any external authority or influence, including the Apostles’ Creed, for example, or the Nicene Creed or the Westminster Catechism. My question is this: **What Christian denominations stand by Nuda or Solo Scriptura and what do they have to say about established creeds and confessions?** EDIT: I appreciate the suggestion that most Protestant denominations accept many of the older creeds. But some denominations reject them. My question asks if there are any such Christian denominations and, if so, why do they reject creeds such as the Apostles/Nicene and Athanasian, etc. **NOTE: I am asking about Nuda or Solo Scriptura**, not Sola Scriptura. The answer to this question delves into Nuda/Solo Scripture and is worth reading: https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/78800/what-denominations-apply-the-doctrine-nuda-scriptura

T.M. Luhrmann cites many instances of this practice in her book *[When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God](https://www.amazon.com/When-God-Talks-Back-Understanding/dp/0307277275)* . Below I share some quotes to illustrate this point: > **ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS a person must master at a church like the Vineyard is to recognize when God is present and when he responds.** **This can seem odd to someone raised in a mainstream church, where God is usually not imagined as a person with whom you have back-and-forth conversation throughout the day**. **At the Vineyard, people speak about recognizing God’s “voice.” They talk about things God has “said” to them about very specific topics—where they should go to school and whether they should volunteer in a day care—and newcomers are often confused by what they mean. Newcomers soon learn that God is understood to speak to congregants inside their own minds**. **They learn that someone who worships God at the Vineyard must develop the ability to recognize thoughts in their own mind that are not in fact their thoughts, but God’s**. **They learn that this is a skill they should master. At the beginning, they usually find both the skill and the very idea of the skill perplexing.** > It is indeed a striking God, this modern God imagined by so many American evangelicals. Each generation meets God in its own manner. Over the last few decades, this generation of Americans has sought out an intensely personal God, a God who not only cares about your welfare but worries with you about whether to paint the kitchen table. These Americans call themselves evangelical to assert that they are part of the conservative Christian tradition that understands the Bible to be literally or near literally true and that describes the relationship with Jesus as personal, and as being born again. But the feature that most deeply characterizes them is that the God they seek is more personally intimate, and more intimately experienced, than the God most Americans grew up with. **These evangelicals have sought out and cultivated concrete experiences of God’s realness. They have strained to hear the voice of God speaking outside their heads.** They have yearned to feel God clasp their hands and to sense the weight of his hands push against their shoulders. They have wanted the hot presence of the Holy Spirit to brush their cheeks and knock them sideways. > In effect, people train the mind in such a way that they experience part of their mind as the presence of God. They learn to reinterpret the familiar experiences of their own minds and bodies as not being their own at all—but God’s. **They learn to identify some thoughts as God’s voice, some images as God’s suggestions, some sensations as God’s touch or the response to his nearness**. They construct God’s interactions out of these personal mental events, mapping the abstract concept “God” out of their mental awareness into a being they imagine and reimagine in ways shaped by the Bible and encouraged by their church community. They learn to shift the way they scan their worlds, always searching for a mark of God’s presence, chastening the unruly mind if it stubbornly insists that there is nothing there. Then they turn around and allow this sense of God—an external being they find internally in their minds—to discipline their thoughts and emotions. **They allow the God they learn to experience in their minds to persuade them that an external God looks after them and loves them unconditionally**. > I call this point of view the anthropological attitude. Anthropologists are taught as students to seek to understand before we judge. We want to understand how people interpret their world before passing judgment on whether their interpretation is right or wrong. And so I will not presume to know ultimate reality. I will not judge whether God is or is not present to the people I came to know. **Yet I believe that if God speaks, God’s voice is heard through human minds constrained by their biology and shaped by their social community**, and I believe that as a psychologically trained anthropologist, I can say something about those constraints and their social shaping. The person who hears a voice when alone has a sensory perception without a material cause, whether its immaterial origin is the divine presence or the empty night. **Only some religious communities encourage people to pay attention to their subjective states with the suggestion that God may speak back to them in prayer. I will ask how a church teaches people to attend to their inner awareness and what training in prayer and practice they provide—and I can answer that question**. Only some people have those startling, unusual experiences (although more people, it happens, than most of us imagine). I will ask whether some people are more likely to have those experiences than others, and whether there are differences in temperament or training that might set those who are able to have such experiences apart from those who don’t—and again, I can answer that question. What is the Biblical basis for this practice? --- ### Similar questions I found on the site https://christianity.stackexchange.com/q/85819/61679 - This question focuses on denominations that believe in hearing from God. Very insightful, but not exactly what I'm asking here. https://christianity.stackexchange.com/q/16215/61679 - This question sounds like a question that someone who is joining the Vineyard for the first time would probably ask. Related but not exactly what I'm asking here. The question was also closed as opinion-based. https://christianity.stackexchange.com/q/8564/61679 - This question captures the frustration of someone who would like to hear from God, but hasn't had the privilege yet. Interesting and related, but not exactly what I'm asking here. https://christianity.stackexchange.com/q/80658/61679 - This question does provide examples of Biblical passages documenting cases in which the Holy Spirit spoke to certain individuals for specific purposes. However, I'm not entirely sure if those passages would constitute the entire Biblical basis that someone from the Vineyard or similar denominations would utilize to support their practices. In addition, that question is concerned with the cessationist perspective, so the focus is different.

God is described as Father *passim* in the New Testament, but where in the Old Testament is God described as a Father?

I have been trying to find any additional information on the news that were published in 2016 about underground church discovered in Turkey, Nevsehir. But there is nothing. Can anyone help? Here is one of the news: https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/historic-church-discovered-in-turkeys-nevsehir-could-change-history-of-orthodoxy-94309 Here is a photo of one of the frescos from the news.

This is an attempt at an on-topic and useful version of [this question](https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/37198/is-creationism-falsifiable) - any edits or feedback to ensure that it meets both of those aims are welcome. To clarify the key term in use: > Falsifiability is the ability of a theory—a working framework for explaining and predicting natural phenomena—to be disproved by an experiment or observation. - Rationalwiki In my opinion, an ideal answer will be structured as an overview of different forms of Creationism with brief descriptions of any relevant theories including references.

Most contemporary Protestants are very favorably disposed toward Jews and explain it with their theology. However, it hasn't always been like that . My question is, what has caused this radical shift in disposition? What theological/Biblical findings have been made known that Martin Luther was unaware of?

If Man creates art in paintings and sculptures, etc, which are depictions of the natural world such as landscapes flora and fauna, life itself and man accepts and qualifies this to be art. Is the subject of this art, itself art? Or is it just man's depiction of the world in painting etc, art, and the natural world is not art? The proposition that the natural world is not art seems absurd to me. Is it necessary that the natural world needs an artist, such as paintings and sculptures need an artist? Is the artist of the natural world God? If Art is a subjective, and an opinion, and there is no consensus of agreement between everybody with regard to there being objective definition of Art, is anybodies definition of art and there examples of this definition of art, not a depiction of the natural world? I wondered if there was a christian perspective within the bible or there are Christian apologetics that would concur with my argument? Or is it flawed?

I have been hearing about the application of the doctrine of *Nuda Scriptura*, where the Bible is separated from all the traditional connotation or context of the Church. They reject creeds and confessions, having Scripture as the only theological resource. But who are the ones who adhere to this doctrine? and on what grounds do they reject *Sola Scriptura* and *Prima Scriptura*?

This question concerns in part the following quote heard regularly by Presbyterian Pastors: > “Catholics deny the sufficiency of Christ’s redemptive work on the cross and by doing so, forfeit their salvation.” The Idea is explained in the following terms: > Christ's sacrifice was perfect, and nothing we can do, not works, not anything, can save us. (Which a Catholic believes) but Catholics have to “DO” things, (as explained by many Pastors): doing Christ in the Eucharist, doing other Sacraments, doing works of Mercy, doing intercessory prayer, doing the Mass each and every week, fasting, alms giving and Prayer. The idea that Catholics “DO” these graces instituted by Christ rather than “Receiving” them, seems to dominate the thinking of many Presbyterian brethren. According to Presbyterians, what would be more perfect, and on what Biblical basis do they justify their choice? 1. (Presbyterian Position)That Christ's Good works cover the sins of men with his sacrifice to the father, So that he no longer sees the the sinful nature of the Person, but rather sees the righteousness of the Son, and we are sanctified by that covering (No Actual Change to the Believer Is necessary after acceptance through faith), or, 2. That Christ actually does more than cover up our sins by the meritorious actions of the Son, but provides for us a Church with Sacraments, Graces for us to help work out our salvation in fear and trembling, to actually increase our sanctity in a fallen world, to avoid the temptations of the flesh and not just to cover up our sinful nature, but to actually change and become sanctified by his Grace (Actual Change to the Believer is necessary after baptism).