Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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Rosenstock-Huessy’s discussion of Voltaire and Rousseau depends on his prior discussion of the role of inspired literature in the formation of a nation. They are adherents to the revolutionary creed of literary inspiration, the “cult o f an inspired literature.” He compares the two to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, for like…
Rosenstock-Huessy deals with a number of interrelated issues in a section of Out of Revolution dealing with Paris and the French notion of nationhood: He talks about the establishment of Paris as the intellectual center of France and of Europe; about the division between Paris and Versailles as background to…
A couple of thoughts on the Calvin quotations I posted yesterday, inspired by a reader’s response. 1) Calvin appeals to his doctrine of “accommodation” to explain why the sign of baptism is necessary. God does speak in ways we can grasp; if that’s all accommodation is, fine. But it often…
Tom Smail’s Like Father, Like Son: The Trinity Imaged in Our Humanity (Eerdmans 2005) has a lot going for it. Written for a general Christian readership, it reflects a thorough familiarity with both tradition and contemporary work on the Trinity, and applies Trinitarian patterns to human life in interesting ways.…
Stahmer offers this useful summary of Rosenstock-Huessy’s and Rosenzweig’s attack on “objectivity”: “For J. G. Hamann, and for all those who have accepted the sacramental qualities inherent in the frailty and tentativeness of human speech, the ambiguities and relativity of history could not possibly be denied. Both Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig…
In their capacity as Sprachdenkern - Speech-thinkers, Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig anticipated a number of developments in philosophy, theology, and hermeneutics. Stahmer writes, “Both Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy, but most especially the latter, can now be seen to have been hermeneutical pioneers who anticipated, by many years, the work of Martin Heidegger,…
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