{"id":292,"date":"2008-06-06T05:04:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-06T05:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/bibleandculture\/2008\/06\/from-russia-with-love.html"},"modified":"2008-06-06T05:04:00","modified_gmt":"2008-06-06T05:04:00","slug":"from-russia-with-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/2008\/06\/from-russia-with-love.html","title":{"rendered":"From Russia With Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"\"<\/a> Here are a series of pictures from my time in Russia the land of golden domes and beautiful icons of Christ and the saints.<\/p>\n
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Above you will see the picture of Moscow Evangelical Seminary where I teach from time to time, and a picture of Natasha and Sasha Tsutserov the latter being the head of the seminary, and my former student and a graduate of St. Andrews University doctoral program. I have been teaching a course all week on Christology, hence the image of Sasha’s favorite icon of Christ– Christ the Golden Hair which I like as well. On Sunday we will travel to the historic city of Vladimir to see the beautiful old churches and icons including the very famous Our Lady of Vladimir. <\/div>\n
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The students here are both engaging and fully engaged with many good questions about Christology. What is especially of note is that they are overwhelmingly Arminian not Calvinist in character as is true all over Russia’s Protestant Churches as also is the case with the Orthodox Church. Having lived so long under ‘determinism’ of a Communist sort, they like their freedom both in society and in their theology as well. For them if Christ has set us free, part of what he set us free from is things being pre-determined by anyone, including God. God’s Son did not come to announce that God had pre-determined all things from before the creation of the world, instead he came to set the captives free and “if the Son has set you free, you are truly free indeed”. It is an odd paradox indeed that in the land of liberty (America) Calvinism plays better than in a land of limited freedom like Russia. Think on these things.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are a series of pictures from my time in Russia the land of golden domes and beautiful icons of Christ and the saints. Above you will see the picture of Moscow Evangelical Seminary where I teach from time to time, and a picture of Natasha and Sasha Tsutserov the latter being the head of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":199,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nFrom Russia With Love - The Bible and Culture<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/2008\/06\/from-russia-with-love.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"From Russia With Love - The Bible and Culture\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Here are a series of pictures from my time in Russia the land of golden domes and beautiful icons of Christ and the saints. 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A graduate of UNC, Chapel Hill, he went on to receive the M.Div. degree from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from the University of Durham in England. He is now considered one of the top evangelical scholars in the world, and is an elected member of the prestigious SNTS, a society dedicated to New Testament studies. Witherington has also taught at Ashland Theological Seminary, Vanderbilt University, Duke Divinity School and Gordon-Conwell. A popular lecturer, Witherington has presented seminars for churches, colleges and biblical meetings not only in the United States but also in England, Estonia, Russia, Europe, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Australia. He has also led tours to Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. Witherington has written over thirty books, including The Jesus Quest and The Paul Quest, both of which were selected as top biblical studies works by Christianity Today. He also writes for many church and scholarly publications, and is a frequent contributor to the Beliefnet website. Along with many interviews on radio networks across the country, Witherington has been seen on the History Channel, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, The Discovery Channel, A&E, and the PAX Network.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/author\/bwitherington"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/199"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}