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Art

The Second Word V: On Images and Art, Part 3

The Failure of the Church Yet a third factor played an important role in this historical development, in addition to the imperial adoption of icons and the rise of the icons of the holy man. Brown writes: "The great Christian basilicas of the previous centuries tended to stand empty, except…

by James B. JordanSeptember 4, 1998
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Biblical Horizons

Patriarchal Dominion

The three large patriarchal narratives of Genesis concern the three aspects of the cosmos: matter, space, and time. Over these three is man given dominion. Lucifer was originally appointed to train man in this dominion, but he chose to lead man into rebellion instead. Thus, the Angel of Yahweh replaced…

by James B. JordanAugust 4, 1998
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Biblical Horizons

The Case Against Western Civilization, Part 6

Part 6: Living in a Dying World (continued) The "Trivium" (continued) The five stages of education are simply the five stages of the covenant as God administers it in human life and history, and in the liturgy of covenant renewal: First, God announces Himself. "I am Yahweh Your God." He…

by James B. JordanAugust 4, 1998
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Biblical Studies

Re-creation in the Ascension Offering

The following essay is tentative and exploratory, offered for your consideration. It seems to me that the ritual of the Ascension Offering (incorrectly translated as Burnt Offering) of Leviticus 1 is a symbolic recapitulation of Genesis 1, which thereby portrays the sacrificial ritual as way of moving from a fallen…

by James B. JordanJuly 4, 1998
Biblical Horizons

The Framework Hypothesis: A Gnostic Heresy

Just as the vast majority of evangelical Christians in America today are Arminian and Baptist, so the vast majority do not believe in a creation around 4000 BC. I don’t expect any of these three situations to change anytime soon. Powerful presuppositions are at work in all three instances, along…

by James B. JordanJuly 4, 1998
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Art

The Second Word V: On Images and Art, Part 2

The Iconoclastic Controversy Continuing Pagan Influence How did images creep in? To begin with, there was in the post-Constantinian Church a concerted effort on the part of the semi-pagans to interpret Christianity in essentially pantheistic terms. The heretics put God and man on a continuum of "being," so that God…

by James B. JordanJuly 4, 1998

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Lacan’s style

In a web article on the “Cult of Lacan,” Richard Webster analyzes a paragraph from one of Lacan’s early works. Referring to his “mirror” theory of childhood development (which, Webster shows, Lacan borrowed without much attribution from one Henri Wallon), Lacan writes, “This jubilant assumption of his specular image by…

December 7, 2006

Lacan’s style

In a web article on the “Cult of Lacan,” Richard Webster analyzes a paragraph from one of Lacan’s early works. Referring to his “mirror” theory of childhood development (which, Webster shows, Lacan borrowed without much attribution from one Henri Wallon), Lacan writes, “This jubilant assumption of his specular image by…

December 7, 2006

Mimetic desire in Lacan

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Developing Freud’s theorisation of sexuality, Lacan’s contention is rather that what psychoanalysis reveals is that human-beings need to learn how and what to desire. Lacanian theory does not deny that infants are always born into the world with basic biological needs that need constant…

December 7, 2006

Freud and Lacan

Louis Althusser offered this helpful description of Lacan’s structuralist revision of Freud: “In his first great work The Interpretation of Dreams . . . , Freud studied the ‘mechanisms’ and ‘laws’ of dreams, reducing their variants to two: displacement and condensation. Lacan recognized these as two essential figures of speech,…

December 7, 2006

5

Boethius says in his De Arithmetica that the number 5 represents an infinite circle: “For 5 times 5, which makes 25, starts from 5 and ends in the same number, 5. And if you multiply that by 5 again, the end turns out to be 5 again. For 5 times…

December 7, 2006
Biblical Studies

Scripture’s eloquence

De Lubac cites this passage near the beginning of his Medieval Exegesis : “The eloquence of Sacred Scripture takes many shapes, and its meanings are many and varied. For this reason someone has said: He compares things that are celestial with things that are earthly, so that likenesses that we…

December 7, 2006

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