Brett Seybold

What are the earliest creeds in Christianity? There are church creeds such as the Nicene Creed (A.D. 325) and the Chalcedonian Creed (A.D. 451), but the earliest creeds go back much farther—to even before the writing of the New Testament. Within the New Testament writings (all written within the first century A.D.), we find creedal […]

Is God silent when we can’t sense him? Although many who seek God find him, others experience him as hidden and absent. What are we to make of this “divine hiddenness”?  Often, we struggle to believe in and trust God, not necessarily because we fail to recognize His existence or suppress evidence of His existence, […]

God’s existence: is it something fixed in reality or something we can explain away? Here are some tools we might use to explain him away.  Can you explain God away? There have been thinkers throughout history who have claimed to be able to explain God away. It’s no surprise that innumerable gods throughout history have […]

What’s the best way to expose self-deception? Daniel McCoy’s Mirage: 5 Things People Want from God That Don’t Exist is a concise work which exposes some of our most potent self-deceptions through colorful story, paraphrase, and metaphor. The reader gains an enlightened concern for several deceptions currently plaguing the church in Western post-Christian society. Yet, […]

Q: Remind me of how influential German thinkers have been. Germany has always been on the cutting edge of various kinds of progress. For example, in the early 1900s, Germany was the most technologically advanced country in the world. Their engineering was way ahead of America’s and Britain’s. When I think of influential theologians, Germany […]

*Editor’s Note: As a missionary in Germany for a decade, Brett Seybold has been a student of the trends of post-Christian Europe and how these trends affect the church in North America. Although Brett loves Germany, his sober assessment of the German relationship with biblical Christianity is realistic and contains many lessons for the North […]

Canon comes from a Greek word meaning “rule” or “standard.” Christians use the word canon to describe the authoritative books which make up our Bible. These books are our rule and standard. To review from the previous article, we don’t find all 27 books being labeled by the church as the definitive New Testament until […]

The 27 books of the New Testament were all written sometime in the 1st century AD. But when were all these 27 books first compiled into what we now call the New Testament? That’s a different question entirely. Were all 27 books compiled together in the 1st Century, when the books were written? No. How […]