Blurry Creatures

In some corners of the church, what Joel Muddamalle and Doug Van Dorn argue in this episode gets called heresy. Their claim is simple and enormous. The Angel of the Lord who stands before Joshua, speaks from the burning bush, and accepts worship without correcting it is the preincarnate Christ. The rabbis saw the tension too. They called it the Two Powers in Heaven, and they ...

Marcus Young grows up in a family that hunts werewolves. This is not folklore, and it is not a campfire story. His great-uncle Harold empties both barrels of buckshot into a creature swaying on a log, and it screams, bleeds a river, and vanishes without a trace a mile and a half into the jungle. His grandfather keeps a matchbox of the hair as proof. Then one night the c...

Where do you go when the church cannot help you? Tisha lived that question. She and her husband moved into their first home, a little 1901 house on Spokane's South Hill, just before their baby was born, with no idea what was buried beneath it. A man was once shot and dragged inside to die. A girl was badly burned. Innocent blood has been spilled on that plot of earth, going b...

The Transfiguration might be the strangest scene in the Gospels. Jesus climbs a mountain, his face lights up, and two men who have been dead for centuries, Moses and Elijah, are suddenly standing there talking with him. Most sermons rush right past it. Robby Gallaty wants to stop and sit in the weirdness. Robby is the senior pastor of Long Hollow Church in Hendersonville, Ten...

Before the world was made, there was a war. Dan McCarthy comes into the basement to trace it back to its source, the moment pride welled up in the highest angel, and he reached for the throne of God. The author of Satan's War Against God argues that most Christians have the enemy all wrong. We shrink him down to a tempter and an accuser, when Scripture describes a fu...