Free Republic

During my daughter’s first year at The Master’s University (an institution with a decidedly dispensational rapture theology), the school spent a week of chapel services devoted to the topic of the rapture of the church. Confused by the topic, she texted me, “What is the rapture? I’ve never heard of that before!” For her, the rapture was a totally foreign concept. As a pastor’s daughter, that may seem like a travesty! But it doesn’t surprise me as I don’t remember ever preaching a sermon on the rapture. Some reading this might be thinking, “You’re right! You haven’t taught on the...

“I didn’t know that for the first 1,500 years of church history, everyone saw it as the literal body and blood of Christ and it wasn’t until 500 years ago that someone popularised the thought that it’s just a symbol and nothing more. I didn’t know that. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s something to consider.’” “For 1500 years it was never one guy and his pulpit being the centre of the church, it was the body and blood of Christ…” Despite what some bloggers and YouTubers are claiming, I don’t think we can say from this video and short clip alone...

Isn’t honoring Mary a Roman Catholic thing? This general ethos can cause Evangelicals to get particularly squeamish around the language of “theotokos” the Mother of God… In the garden of Eden, after Adam had disobeyed God and before he was forced out of the garden, God promised in Genesis 3:15 that a seed would come from the woman, who would crush the head of the Serpent, thereby turning back the curse and putting an end to the enmity between man and God. This Seed, therefore, would need to be a new Adam—a new head of a new human race, since...

Want to know how long the new pope has been active in pro-life? - Cardinal Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, was co-founder of the campus right-to-life organization “Villanovans for Life”—the oldest college pro-life club in the U.S. (he was Class of 1977)! @samuelhlee - @JennieMFL Love that our new Pope is a marcher for Life! 🎉🎈👏 - Robert Prevost @drprevost Marcha por la vida en Chiclayo. ¡Defendamos la vida humana en todo momento! - @CatHadro And in a sentence I never thought I would write - Pope Leo XIV once retweeted my husband’s news article. “Catholic group to Illinois...

It is a dogma of the Catholic faith that the Blessed Virgin Mary was not only a virgin when she conceived and bore Jesus but that she remained a virgin ever after. Most Protestant Christians today deny this – but do they know that many of their early leaders believed it? Here are 5 examples of major Protestant leaders who rejected huge swaths of Catholic dogma, but – you may surprised to learn – defended the perpetual virginity of Mary: 1) Martin Luther is usually considered to be the person who sparked the Protestant Reformation. He rejected core Catholic dogmas...

When most people hear "Easter," they think of a single Sunday filled with lilies, hymns, and maybe a few chocolate eggs. But in the Church's liturgical calendar, Easter is far more than just a day—it's a whole season. In fact, Easter lasts for 50 days! That’s right—Easter is a season, not just a Sunday. Easter Sunday kicks off a 50-day celebration known as Eastertide or the Great Fifty Days, which runs from Easter Sunday to Pentecost Sunday. This season is meant to be a joyful, ongoing reflection on the resurrection of Jesus Christ and what it means for the world....

He had no doubts at first, but slowly they emerged. He was struck, he says, by the fact that the first coins bearing Muhammad’s name did not appear until the late 7th century — six decades after the religion did. He traded ideas with some scholars in Saarbrücken who in recent years have been pushing the idea of Muhammad’s nonexistence. They claim that “Muhammad” wasn’t the name of a person but a title, and that Islam began as a Christian heresy. Prof. Kalisch didn’t buy all of this. Contributing last year to a book on Islam, he weighed the odds...

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If our positions are properly calibrated to the truth, moderating them is not an act of virtue but one of cowardice.In college, my freshman theology professor constantly made us repeat the saying: “A text without a context is a pretext for a prooftext.” In other words, twisting Scripture out of context to back up a predetermined position is dangerous business. If Rick Warren had been taught the same thing, he might have thought twice before dishonestly using Jesus’s crucifixion to chastise Christians for their political convictions.The evangelical pastor took to X Wednesday morning to twist John 19:18 into a call...

A look at the Quranic verses chosen by Al-Qassam’s spokesperson in his speech this week allows a glimpse into Hamas’s religiously motivated modus operandi. Earlier this week, the spokesman for the Al-Qassam militia, Abu Obeida, released a pre-recorded speech on the occasion of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. The speech featured some predictable content, including lauding the Gazan population for what he deemed a ‘victory,’ calling to ‘escalate’ frictions against Israeli forces in Judea and Samaria, commending the Islamic Republic and its proxies, and warning against the failure of normalization with Israel. However, one peculiar point stood out:...

When I speak of Christians being illiterate, I have far more in mind than just the inability of some to properly read and write – in that they are simply the product of the modern Western education. But I am speaking here of a wider sort of illiteracy, one that is as regrettable as it is widespread. I refer to historical illiteracy, theological illiteracy, biblical illiteracy, church history illiteracy, etc. Far too many Christians in the West today are woefully ignorant of that which they should not be ignorant. They know little about their own faith, their own Christian culture...

All Christians who study the Bible inevitably face the complexity of comprehending how the Old and New Testaments hold together. Interpreting the role of national Israel, and more generally the Israel-church relationship, is a test case of biblical theology, that is, how one synthesizes the Bible’s teaching about the people of God on the Bible’s own terms and in view of the overarching narrative and storyline of the whole Bible. Serious Bible readers examine how the individual portions of the Bible fit within the whole and how biblical topics and themes develop across the biblical covenants from earlier to later...

The sexual revolution involved an increase in casual attitudes toward the meaning of one’s body and sexuality. With the new availability of contraception, people were able to engage in sexual activity for pleasure without the potential consequence of pregnancy. Psychologist Wilhelm Reich believed that a casual attitude toward sex would provide more happiness for people than Catholic limitations on sexuality. In response to this, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, Pope Saint John Paul II gave a series of talks that proclaimed the goodness of the body. The pope presented the idea that sex was meant to be...

Disclaimer: I am amazed to see the tremendous support from Christians all over the world for us, the Israeli people, and the Zionist endeavor. I find, however, certain points that I believe need to be addressed. We may read a controversial piece in the news and automatically side with Israel, but keep in mind that even our elected policymakers fall short. For example, we tend not to conflate the fact that Tel-Aviv, the symbol of Zionist financial success and achievement, is also the gay capital of the world, but we should. Abortions are also legal in Israel, government subsidized, easily...

Just when the people thought they could let down their guard, their enemies showed up again. The wall was near completion. All that was left was to hang the doors in the gates (v. 1). When their enemies heard about it, they schemed to do harm, being driven by bitter envy. Envy occurs when a person lacks another's superior quality, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it. The enemies didn’t want to accept that the Jews had a new wall that would allow them to reclaim their city. So this time the attack...

Pastor Greg Laurie and Pastor Don Stewart discuss why America is not mentioned in the Bible as a part of the last days. Are we no longer a Superpower? Are we no longer a nation? All this and more in this video you will not want to miss

Italy, Vatican, New Theology is on the way. Open to all extraterrestrial beings? An Italian newspaper managed to obtain exclusively a draft of the document regarding what should be the cornerstones of a New Theology that also seems to be inspired by Pope Bergoglio's encyclical "Brothers All" but expanded to a Cosmological version and vision. A text that is circulating confidentially among Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans and Benedictines and that also seems to trace Psalm 24 (23) where it is written "of the Lord is the earth and its contents, the universe and its inhabitants," also often quoted by Bishop Balducci....

"God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son" (Heb. 1:1-2). Jesus not only brought but in fact was God’s full and final revelation. A Samaritan woman declared, "I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ); when that One comes, He will declare all things to us" (John 4:25). The expectation of that day, even among the Samaritans, was that Messiah would unfold the full and final revelation of God. The Holy Spirit, through the writer...

In this video we discuss why all Christians should pray the Rosary.

Did you know that Jesus Christ was a racist? In a TikTok video, Reverend Brandan Robertson asserts that the Son of God used a racial slur. Robertson is an author, activist, public theologian, and the pastor of Missiongathering Christian Church in San Diego, California. This racist action supposedly takes place in Chapter 7 of the Gospel of Mark, when Jesus is sought out by a Syrophoenician woman in the district of Tyre. She begs Jesus to free her daughter from the demon that is possessing her. Robertson said that Jesus replied, “It’s not good for Me to give the children’s...