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American Politics

Obama as Fool

It is clear now that Barack Obama is a fool. This was clear to anyone with Biblical wisdom during the campaign, but it is now becoming clear to everyone. The following analysis of this narcissist is invaluable: http://www.globalpolitician.com/25109-barack-obama-elections These rather radical comments are also worth considering: http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/print.asp?ID=9668 What is telling…

by James B. JordanMarch 4, 2009
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Biblical Studies

Rainbow Coalition

I was asked to provide comments on the rainbow in the Bible. Here are some for starters: 1. God puts his warbow in the sky for HIM to see and remember the covenant. 2. In Revelation 4-5, this warbow is around His throne, so He sees it all the time.…

by James B. JordanMarch 3, 2009
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Biblical Horizons

Marriage By Faith

We are about to enter a new era of world history. How will it come? The last time it came, it came by means of God conquering the impossible and overcoming barriers that were superhuman. That is how God does it every time He does a new thing. The last…

by Richard BledsoeFebruary 15, 2009
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Biblical Horizons

What Happens if the Church Does Not Sing the Imprecatory Psalms?

What happens if the church doesn’t sing the Imprecatory Psalms? We don’t like them. They are mean and nasty, and the one outstanding virtue inculcated in our public schools and universities (as Allan Bloom noted more than twenty years ago in his observations of American college students) is “niceness.” But…

by Richard BledsoeFebruary 10, 2009
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Biblical Horizons

Objectivity and Schizophrenia

The whole of the modern world is still an outworking of Augsburg and Westphalia. It is now a world incapable of marriage, intimacy, and relationship. The whole of the modern world is terribly, terribly wounded. It gives rise to children who have a variety of dysfunctions. Some of them are…

by Richard BledsoeJanuary 21, 2009
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Anxiety

Marriage and Betrayal

Perhaps the most fearful of all possibilities in the world is the possibility of betrayal on the part of someone who is in a “position of trust.” This, unfortunately, is the first block in what ought to be the foundation of every marriage in the world. Every woman has a…

by Richard BledsoeJanuary 15, 2009

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Putting right

At least since the Reformation, the choices on the meaning of justification have been two: Either justification is a declaration of right standing or it’s a making-righteous (as in Bonaventure’s claim that the grace of justification purifies, illuminates, and perfects the soul). But are these the only alternatives? McGrath says…

April 20, 2006

Entry language

NT Wright’s denial that justification is “entry language” is usually taken as a criticism of evangelical Protestant treatments of justification. But his denial cuts deeper: From the high middle ages, Roman Catholic theologians taught that justification was a motus from sin to grace. From Wright’s viewpoint, the Reformers agreed with…

April 20, 2006
Philosophy

Notes on Derrida, Gift of Death

Some of the summaries below were previously posted on my site, and are reproduced to help my students. 1) Derrida begins the book with a discussion of Jan Patocka’s treatment of the distinction between “enthusiasm” or the “demonic” and “responsibility.” The former “confuses the limits among the animal, the human,…

April 19, 2006

Divine Energies and Orthodox Soteriology

In his new Being with God , Aristotle Papanikolaou points to differences between Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas on the issue of divine energies. For Lossky, the doctrine of divine energies is designed to “protect the real character of communion with God” in theosis while also insisting that union with…

April 19, 2006

Schmemann on Eucharist

Thanks to my student Brent McLean for the following quotation from Schmemann’s Journals: “I reflect, while writing my Eucharist, about Communion, on the strange, mysterious alienation from it in the Church (on Mt. Athos - they didn’t regularly take Communion; in our churches, those who seek frequent Communion are held…

April 19, 2006
History

Passion

Stephen Jaeger’s wonderful Ennobling Love (1999) sets up some bizarre juxtapositions. On the one hand, here is Anselm of Bec writing to two novices about the join the monastic community: “My eyes eagerly long to see your face, most beloved; my arms stretch out to your embraces. My lips long…

April 18, 2006

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