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Biblical Horizons

Who Rules the Land? The Meaning of the Noahic Covenant, Part 1

It is commonly held in Reformed thought that the Noahic Covenant is given to all men equally. The Noahic Covenant concerns "man," not simply "church," and establishes civil government as an institution among "mankind" — that is the theory. Sometimes the Noahic Covenant is regarded as a "covenant of common…

by James B. JordanNovember 23, 1990
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Daniel

The Babylonian Connection

The Fall of Jerusalem we have dated (provisionally) at 3426 Anno Mundi. In current B.C. dates this is 586 B.C. From this point forward in Biblical chronology we are required to make use of prophetic numbers rather than historical ones. Jeremiah prophesied that the captivity would last 70 years, but…

by James B. JordanNovember 16, 1990
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Biblical Horizons

Taking the Situation Seriously

Evangelicals have in recent years become more interested in looking into their Bibles for wisdom to deal with modern problems. This is undoubtedly a welcome development, after many years of neglect. But there are dangers and costs as well. One of these is the tendency to fall into a modern…

by Peter LeithartOctober 19, 1990
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Hermeneutics

The Unseen Things

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1). The famous definition of faith with which the eleventh chapter of Hebrews opens has received a number of different interpretations. The crux of the problem is the interpretation of the words translated in…

by Peter LeithartOctober 19, 1990
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Proverbs

Advice From a Sojourner, Part 8

15. The leech has two daughters, "Give," "Give." There are three things that will not be satisfied, Four that will not say, "Enough": 16. Sheol, And the barren womb, Earth, that is never satisfied with water, And fire that never says, "Enough." We are assuming, at least for the purposes…

by James B. JordanOctober 16, 1990
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Biblical Chronology

Confusion Among the Kings

As we have seen in previous installments in this series, the Old Testament is quite concerned with chronology, and carefully records chronological data for our use. For this reason, we can assume when we come to the chronology of the kings of Judah and Israel that the writers of the…

by James B. JordanOctober 2, 1990

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History

Universal exile

Ancient politics had to do with governing a people set in a particular location; so did the modern politics of the nation-state. With the large-scale population movements of the last half-century, the ethnic homogeneity of the nation-state (never entirely homogenous to begin with) has dissolved further. Nationality is no longer…

November 8, 2006
History

World Citizens

Political scientist David Jacobson notes the connection between immigration and shifts in understandings of rights: “Transnational migration is steadily eroding the traditional basis of nation-state membership, namely citizenship. As rights have come to be predicated on residency, not citizen state, the distiction between ‘citizen’ and ‘alian’ has eroded. The devaluation…

November 8, 2006
Economics

Iconomics

The reviewer of Ernest Sterberg’s 1999 Economy of Icons in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology summarizes some main points from this latter-day Thorstein Veblen: “The thesis of this controversial book is that ‘enterprises make their way in the capitalist economy by transforming commodities into icons.’ An icon is…

November 8, 2006
History

Artificial selves

Discussions of the postmodern self often trace a genealogy from Descartes to Locke to Kant to Nietzsche to Heidegger to Foucault. But though philosophers no doubt have some influence on the daily experiences of normal humans, this sort of treatment doesn’t quite get to the ground level. In 1991, Paul…

November 7, 2006
History

End of history

Evidence that Fukuyama may have had it right: Walter Truett Anderson writes that “the International Commission on Peace and Food (in its 1994 report) pointed to the urgent need to create employment for hundreds of millions of poor people, and at the same time dismissed the notion that most of…

November 7, 2006
History

We’re All Communitarians now

Psychologist Brewster Smith decries the solvents of postmodern life - cynicism, shallowness, sensationalism, warfare between fundamentalisms and relativisms, uncertainty about all standards, the “fin de siecle sense of drift and doom” (even after the fin). What’s his solution? Find yourself a community that can give you values, standards, a heritage,…

November 7, 2006

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