Jesus Christ

The first coming of Jesus posed a problem for those being confronted with Him. The question was: Who is this Jesus? Is He only human or is He also divine as He claimed? And, if so, how are we to understand God? Is God one, are there several Gods or do we find a plurality of divine persons in one ...

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With the end of the first century of the Christian Era and the death of John, the last intimate eyewitness of Christ’s ministry, questions began to surface: Who was Jesus? Why did He come? Why did He die? Responses to such queries came through a host of metaphors found in the Scriptures: the sacr...

With Pope Benedict XVI the Catholic Church has a theologian on “the throne of St. Peter” who seems to know exactly what he does and who has already made quite an impact. In his speech in Regensburg he quoted the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (1391-1425) who had asked what new things Moh...

It is good to remember certain events that took place in the past, for instance, one’s childhood and family, one’s wedding, the birth of one’s children, and one’s baptism. It is easier to remember an event, if a symbol is connected to it or if certain feasts are celebrated. Therefore, we celebrat...

Seventh-day Adventist theology presents two alternative views concerning the human nature of Jesus Christ. Christ had a sinful human nature because He had a sinful mother like the rest of us, or He had a sinless human nature because, unlike the rest of us, He had God for His Father. The first vi...

Paper presented at dialogue with World Evangelical Alliance, Andrews University, August 6, 2007

Western societies are often quite individualistic, missing the importance of a corporate entity. Yet groups of people are very important and can function in ways individuals cannot. Here is an illustration: Think about matches. An individual match can easily be broken. However, if ten or twenty m...

The controversy over the doctrine of the Trinity in the church is now present in several parts of the world field. One of the arguments used to support the idea that Christ was not eternal but that He had a beginning is that the title monogenēs means “only begotten.” As we will indicate, this i...

John 5:18 contains a statement not found in this form in any of the Gospels or other parts of the New Testament: “For this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal w...

The idea of the end of the world or the invasion of planet earth by extraterrestrial beings has repeatedly been the topic of popular films. Already in 1974 a film about the second coming of Christ in the form of a documentary frightened hundreds of Canadians. Obviously many viewers regarded the b...