Cosmos And Revelation

Science and technology have profoundly altered the cosmic and societal perceptions of the world. Regrettably, the Christian imagination has not kept pace. Most believers still adhere to pre-scientific views. Cosmos and Revelation urges the Christian community to reimagine God’s creation by engaging the data of science. For if God has indeed brought forth an intelligible world for us to explore through scientific research, those who profess this faith ought to, as a minimum, allow scientific findings to expand their theological horizon. Drawing on his scientific qualification and academic background in theology, Peter R. Stork opens several windows on God’s creation, from galactic star nurseries to the wonderland of living cells. After rereading Genesis 1 and 2, the author interlaces examples and reflections to present a coherent yet provocative sketch of the new landscape that spreads out before us, leaving it to his readers to intuit for themselves the immensities Christians are challenged to embrace in the age of science.

Science and technology have profoundly altered the cosmic and societal perceptions of the world. Regrettably, the Christian imagination has not kept pace. Most believers still adhere to pre-scientific views. Cosmos and Revelation urges the Christian community to reimagine God's creation by engaging the data of science. For if God has indeed brought forth an intelligible world for us to explore through scientific research, those who profess this faith ought to, as a minimum, allow scientific findings to expand their theological horizon. Drawing on his scientific qualification and academic background in theology, Peter R. Stork opens several windows on God's creation, from galactic star nurseries to the wonderland of living cells. After rereading Genesis 1 and 2, the author interlaces examples and reflections to present a coherent yet provocative sketch of the new landscape that spreads out before us, leaving it to his readers to intuit for themselves the immensities Christians are challenged to embrace in the age of science.

Many times upon completion of a journey you review events and are amazed at how quickly time passed and what has occurred. So it is with a single life experience or many. Hundreds, thousands, or millions of years may have passed historically, but in reality these are only happenings in the experience of a soul's eternal existence. Therefore, we will endeavor through this book's information to give you a fuller understanding of the realities of life so that the spiritual aspect of you can be more in harmony with your physical body's existence. Cosmic Revelation offers a glimpse into our personal relationship with Earth. Is our destiny as an individual predetermined before birth? If yes, where does free will and free choice enter into the picture? We speak of peace, however the world is still in turmoil. Millions of individuals are hungry, poor, and homeless. We have the technology to feed everyone, to ensure every human being on the planet has clean drinking water and safe shelter. Is it that greed rules the globe? Peace is possible. It's been talked about for hundreds and thousands of years, yet it seems elusive. Cosmic Revelation is a book that calls upon you to listen to your soul and reach out for peace and the preservation of our planet.

The New Testament and the Future of the Cosmos is an exploration into the cosmic eschatology of the New Testament. It invites the reader to grapple with two interrelated questions along with the author: (1) What did the writers of the New Testament teach about the fate of the cosmos, and (2) can we synthesize their teachings into a coherent New Testament theology? By offering a close reading of key texts that inform the topic (most notably Matt 24:29–31; Mark 13:24–27; Luke 21:25–28; Rom 8:19–22; Heb 12:25–29; 2 Pet 3:4–13; and Rev 21:1–5), it is argued that one can, with certain qualifications, ascertain a clear and coherent New Testament message pertaining to the future of the cosmos. Along the way, new exegetical ground is broken in several passages by identifying a previously unnoticed theme that runs throughout the New Testament concerning the future of the cosmos: God’s judgment of the heavenly powers of evil as a key component to the cosmic transition. At present, these hostile powers hold the cosmos captive to death, but on the Day of the Lord they will be overthrown, setting the stage for a materially transformed world to emerge from the hand of God.

From our first ABCs to the Book of Revelation’s statement that Jesus is “the Alpha and Omega,” we see the world through our letters. More than just a way of writing, the alphabet is a powerful concept that has shaped Western civilization and our daily lives. In The Letter and the Cosmos, Laurence de Looze probes that influence, showing how the alphabet has served as a lens through which we conceptualize the world and how the world, and sometimes the whole cosmos, has been perceived as a kind of alphabet itself. Beginning with the ancient Greeks, he traces the use of alphabetic letters and their significance from Plato to postmodernism, offering a fascinating tour through Western history. A sharp and entertaining examination of how languages, letterforms, orthography, and writing tools have reflected our hidden obsession with the alphabet, The Letter and the Cosmos is illustrated with copious examples of the visual and linguistic phenomena which de Looze describes. Read it, and you’ll never look at the alphabet the same way again.

Joel M. Rothman considers the significance of cosmology in biblical and extra-biblical texts, and the role of the cosmic journey in many apocalyptic narratives. He posits that Revelation's narrative likewise takes the hearer on a virtual journey, through a cosmic story-space of great theological significance. While scholarship commonly assumes a three-tiered cosmos in Revelation, Rothman argues that Revelation's narrative operates in a four-tiered cosmos, with the hyper-heaven sitting above the sky-heaven, earth, and abyssal depths; a cosmic story-space that is recreated in the imagination of the hearers. Beginning with a methodology of visual narrative reading, Rothman then discusses the assumptions and existing conceptions regarding heaven and earth. He stresses that Revelation does not exhibit tension in its portrayal of heaven - between heaven as a site of conflict and heaven as the realm in which God truly reigns - but rather shows readers a sky-heaven characterised by archetypal conflict between powerful sky-beings and a hyper-heaven defined by full recognition of the Throne. In journeying through the sky-structure and God-space and by analysing the four cosmic layers in operation, the distinct nature of the two sky-spaces, cosmic change and the ideological import of the cosmic structure, Rothman demonstrates that the existence of the hyper-heaven - in contradistinction with the limited lived-cosmos of earth and sky-heaven - is a present guarantee of the final cosmic transformation that creates a new space for human life, exclusive of imperial draconian elements.

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of the Bible. When we read Scripture we often imagine that the world inhabited by the Bible's characters was much the same as our own. We would be wrong. The biblical world is an ancient world with a flat earth that stands at the center of the cosmos, and with a vast ocean in the sky, chaos dragons, mystical mountains, demonic deserts, an underground zone for the dead, stars that are sentient beings, and, if you travel upwards and through the doors in the solid dome of the sky, God's heaven--the heart of the universe. This book takes readers on a guided tour of the biblical cosmos with the goal of opening up the Bible in its ancient world. It then goes further and seeks to show how this very ancient biblical way of seeing the world is still revelatory and can speak God's word afresh into our own modern worlds.