Pastor Foltz is Pastor Emeritus of Saint James Lutheran Church in Gettysburg, PA and author of the the Frontline Study content.
Throughout the years, being spiritual has usually referred to experiencing God’s presence in one’s life. When the early church spoke of Jesus’ Spirit living on after His death, they meant more than merely recalling past experiences and reports, more than simply adhering to what He taught during His ministry. They insisted that after the resurrection, […]
I am trying to develop an understanding of spirituality that makes sense in the 21st century. I started by examining what the Bible has to say. When I reached the New Testament, I found that Luke-Acts, John, and Paul make a significant point about Jesus’ resurrection, releasing the Holy Spirit in a new way. Paul […]
If you had asked me a year ago what it means to be spiritual, I would have begun discussing different classifications of life, such as physical, mental, and spiritual. Then I would’ve attempted to describe the characteristics of each. Over the past year, I’ve become increasingly intrigued by the number of people in various situations […]
Spirit is one of the most constant terms in the bible. It is used for God. It is used for humans. It is used to express the relationship between the two. Yet like the air we breathe, it is so prevalent we seldom notice it. In fact, Scripture often portrays the spirit as the air […]
Biblical scholars typically begin their discussion of “spirit” by cautioning that there is no consistent meaning throughout the Bible. They then most often describe how wind and breath are used at the most basic level. This relatively simple perspective uses the wind to describe the presence of God. The first creation story in Genesis begins, […]
I want to lay a foundation for examining spirituality. Mental activity has broken down to support the competing ideologies in our present social conflict. Although “spirit” has always had a multi-dimensional meaning, I felt it still had the potential to bring together diverse attitudes. The aesthetic seemed able to discuss differences without descending into chaos. […]
I was surprised that the first thing that jumped out at me when I reflected on this series was how much the religious and political authorities resisted the message of the prophets. Admittedly, at the invitation of some of our readers, I was reading their comments, focusing on what they said to our current political […]
Except for a very few small sects, prophecy as an office in which a person received a message directly from God disappeared from Christianity for 2000 years. The institutional Church used canon, creed, educated theologians, and consecrated authority to discern what God was doing and evaluate individual spiritual thoughts and experiences. Then suddenly in the […]
Prophecy moves in a very interesting direction in the New Testament. A good third of the Old Testament, 17 books in all, are records of prophetic visions. There is only one in the New. That seems strange when the main character is portrayed as a prophet. Jesus is executed by the religious and political authorities […]
The one thing all religious people can agree upon about Jesus is that he was a prophet. Even Muslims believe he spoke on behalf of God. Like the Old Testament prophets, Jesus insisted that worship is useless if one does not live according to God’s ways. He went so far that his picture of the […]
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