Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the Bible, fatness is such a blessing, that it is especially hard to understand why wicked men are permitted to enjoy such a state. It requires a theodicy and faith in God. Thus: “For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek . They are…
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The allusion to the Exodus story is contained in the first words of Deuteronomy 14:1 — “ye are the sons of Yahweh your God” — as well as in 14:2 in the use of the technical term translated “treasured possession,” “His own possession,” “peculiar people,” “precious people,” and so forth.…
I have argued that Deuteronomy 14:1-21 is an independent literary unit that applies the Third Word to the lives of Israelites from the time of Moses and Joshua. In this short pericope, Moses suggests broad and deep meaning by means of literary allusion to the stories of the creation and…
In his recently republished The New Creation , the late, delightful Herbert McCabe defends the priesthood of the plebs as roundly as anyone could want. Citing Hebrews, he claims that "there is an essential difference between the Christian community and the community of the Old Law, or any other religious…
Augustine famously prayed, “Our hearts our restless until they rest in You.” True indeed. Being creatures, we inherently sense our ontological poverty—our innate condition of dependence—and are compelled to find a sense of security. And it is also true—as Augustine’s own narrative painfully illustrates—that one of the things we most…
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A pure heart is one that is not contaminated by base motives. It is a undivided heart. 50,000 of the sons of Zebulun were in David’s army, and they “could draw up in battle formation with all kinds of weapons of war and helped David with an undivided heart” (1…
Samuel Johnson says that “all appropriated terms of art should be sunk in general expressions, because poetry is to speak a general language.” Barfield disagrees: “Johnson was hopelessly wrong.” What poets do above all is express things in terms that are not general: “They express, as nearly as any word…
Barfield thinks it’s disastrous to oppose poetry and science “as two fundamentally opposite modes of experiencing Life.” Among other things, it spoils art: “For it leads straight to that Crocean conception of art as meaningless emotion - as personal emotion symbolized - which is so poisonous in its charter to…
Barfield responds to critics who charge that his attention to individual words “is a precious and dilettante kind of criticism.” He says “the reverse is the truth” and further argues that “Words whose meanings are relatively fixed and established, words which can be defined - words, that is, which are…
Guy de Maupassant says, “Les mots ont une ame . . . . Il faut trouver cette ame qui apparait au contact d’autres mots” (Words have a soul . . . . It is necessary to find this soul which appears at contact with other words). Owen Barfield, who quotes…
Hamann opposed the abstractionism of the Enlightenment partly by emphasizing the centrality of sexuality in language, experience, and thought. He called himself a “spermatologist” in the sense that he was sowing seeds and in the sense that the thought of the relation of revelation and reason in sexual terms: “our…
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