Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
As Adam and Eve walked to the center of the Garden of Eden to meet with the LORD on their first Sabbath they conversed about the origin and age of the earth. Adam: You know, honey, we spent a lot of time yesterday making preparations for our house, and we…
Some of our forefathers believed in reading/singing the psalms in order. Today, when the psalms are even used at all, they tend to be used randomly, though sometimes tied to a church calendar or to the pastor’s sermon. The Bible does not bind us to any particular practice, but there…
Dr. Collins begins his essay with a brief statement of the Day Age view and then a brief statement of the Six Day view, focussing on the challenge to that view posed by modern "science." He ends this discussion by writing: "Two crucial points are at stake here: first, the…
In his The Construction of Social Reality , Berkeley philosopher John Searle puzzles over the ontology of the products of human construction. Certain things – granite, platypi, weeping willows – occur naturally; while other realities – stone walls, zoos and parks, Chase Manhattan Bank – exist only as products of…
In the journal Presbyterion 20 (1994):109-130, published by Covenant Theological Seminary, Dr. C. John Collins sets forth a revision of the Day Age approach in his essay, "How Old Is the Earth? Anthropomorphic Days in Genesis 1:1–2:3." Dr. Collins’s essay has been widely accepted in evangelical Presbyterian circles as an…
The Righteousness of Shem and Japheth As noted above, the action of Shem and Japheth was purely symbolic. They did not need to cover Noah with a garment, for he was already covered by the tent. Their action was a symbolic affirmation of Noah’s authority, a symbolic rejection of Ham’s…
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Umberto Eco ( Limits of Interpretation ) criticizes Barthes’s notion that connotation occurs when “a sign function (Expression plus Content) becomes in turn the expression of a further content.” He argues that “in order to have a connotation, that is, a second meaning of a sign, the whole underlying first…
Isaiah 6:10 says that Isaiah’s ministry will make the hearts of Israel “fat” and their ears “heavy” ( kabad ). The phrasing is unique to Isaiah 6, but the combination of heavy and fat conjures up Eli, who also was going blind. Isaiah 6 is a new Samuel, and like…
MH Abrams notes that at the heart of Romanticism was a transfer of Christian concepts into a new, subjectivist, context: “Much of what distinguishes writers I call ‘Romantic’ derives from the fact that they undertook, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values…
Frank Lentricchia argues that there is “no unmediated historical knowledge,” and adds: “That is reserved for God, or for theorists like Hirsch who believe that objective knowledge can be acquired in a massive act of dispossessing ourselves of the only route to knowledge that we have: the historicized self. What…
Roger Lundin notes that modern interpretation often seeks an unmediated encounter with the text, and then adds: “Both Keith Thomas and Charles Taylor trace it, in part, to the Reformation’s anti-sacramental impulses, which fed into the desacralizing of nature that seventeenth-century science and commerce eagerly promoted. The process accelerated through…
For centuries, piano virtuosos had thrilled audiences with audacious performances of Liszt’s seventh Etude (in G minor, “Eroica”). Liszt scholars had written analyses of the music, and critics had compared various performances to one another and to what they believed was Liszt’s original intention for the music. An industrious Liszt…
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