Theology Pathfinder

Christians, Don’t Ignore How Weird the Book of Jude Is

By Derek DeMars on March 8, 2023 • ( 4 )

The Book of Jude is fascinating, frustrating, and far too overlooked. It also opens a pretty big can of worms when it comes to understanding the inspiration and canon of Scripture.

Recent Posts

Early Christians Debated How to Interpret Genesis, Too

By Derek DeMars on January 4, 2023 • ( 3 )

For many folks with a little exposure to church history, this is actually old news. Discussions of how to interpret the early chapters of Genesis are as old as Christianity. But since I’ve been reading through the major theologians of… Read More ›
The Earliest Church Fathers on Election and Predestination (Part Two: Apostolic Fathers)

By Derek DeMars on August 31, 2021 • ( 5 )

Christians have long wrestled with the subject of how God’s plans and actions in salvation interact with human responsibility and choice. And it is common for proponents of any theological system to appeal to the writings of theologians from the… Read More ›
The Earliest Church Fathers’ Views on Election and Predestination (Part One: Clement of Rome)

By Derek DeMars on August 27, 2021 • ( 4 )

One topic that’s of perennial interest to Christians is the question of how God’s role in saving people intersects with human choice. How does God’s sovereignty (or, more accurately, his providence) relate to human responsibility? The question arises because the… Read More ›
The Apocryphal Book of Sirach and its Influence on Early Christianity

By Derek DeMars on July 23, 2021 • ( 0 )

One of the apocryphal books I think is particularly interesting is the book called “The Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach.” It has also gone by a couple of other names, such as simply Sirach, Ben Sira, or Ecclesiasticus. It is… Read More ›
The Apocrypha in a Nutshell

By Derek DeMars on July 19, 2021 • ( 3 )

Recently I’ve been working my way through the Apocrypha. If you aren’t familiar with these, they are a collection of Jewish writings composed during the time between the Old and New Testaments (400 BC to the first century AD). The… Read More ›
What Did Worship Look Like in the Early Church?

By Derek DeMars on April 21, 2021 • ( 16 )

In my recent deep-dive back into church history, one of the things I’ve been most interested in is learning more about what early Christian worship looked like. There’s certainly a lot we can learn simply from reading the New Testament…. Read More ›
The Earliest Church Handbook: The Didache

By Derek DeMars on December 3, 2020 • ( 3 )

In this new video post, I’m giving a quick introduction to what is likely the oldest church handbook in history, The Didache (aka the “Teaching” or “Instruction”). This short, ancient text gives us a fascinating window into the everyday practices… Read More ›
Getting to Know the Earliest Church Fathers

By Derek DeMars on November 30, 2020 • ( 5 )

The history of Christianity is long and complex, but as I’ve written previously, there are a ton of reasons why it’s worth getting to know a little more about. Learning how the earliest Christians understood and lived out their faith… Read More ›
Book Review: The Openness of God

By Derek DeMars on August 11, 2020 • ( 0 )

Open theism is a topic that tends to rustle a lot of feathers, especially in some conservative/fundamentalist camps where the view often gets immediately labeled as unorthodox or even blasphemous. When I was in seminary, it was always quickly dismissed… Read More ›

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