Tag Reformation

Daughters of Babylon

The Reformation is often remembered as a brave return to Scripture. But it also unfolded in a world where faith and government were tightly bound together. So what should we make of the churches that emerged during that era? What did they renew, and where did political pressures pull faith communities back into old patterns of power and rivalry? And when Revelation warns about religion becoming entangled with rulers, does it offer a lens for reading that period of history with both honesty and hope?

The Man of Lawlessness

2 Thessalonians warns that a “man of lawlessness” will arise as the day of the Lord approaches, exalting himself within God’s “temple.” Many today read that warning as a single future end-time ruler, while others locate its main horizon in the first-century Roman world. This article follows a historicist line of reading that treats the image as a recurring pattern: when political power and religious authority fuse, faith can be remade into court religion, and communities can be pressured to give ultimate loyalty where it belongs to Christ alone. Do these prophecies invite us less to guess a name, and more to test where our allegiance is being trained?

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