Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
During one of my AAPC lectures I read a portion of Richard Mitchell’s provocative little book The Underground Grammarian . Here’s the portion I read: The mind is a rudderless wanderer blown here or there by any puff of breeze. If I mention watermelons, you must think of watermelons; if…
This is the donation thank-you essay for January 2008. Our studies in the Psalms go out month by month in response to donations. I’m putting this one up here as an example, and also because the version I actually mailed out contained several egregious arithmetical errors! So, here is the…
Part 1: Introduction The collapse of the Western tradition in the United States, seen in the hostility to Christianity in government and education, and the elimination of “traditional” or “canon” learning from our institutions of middle and higher learning, provides a crisis and an opportunity for serious believers at the…
While “forgiving oneself” is widely accepted in the secular world as a legitimate and needful thing to do, Christians are rightly suspicious. After all, God is the one who forgives. When we sin against other people, we need to seek their forgiveness, not our own. Nevertheless after looking at Vine’s…
This was originally published as HIStory in the column, “A Pastor’s Perspective” in Ligonier Ministrie’s Tabletalk Magazine . I am not sure of the date but it was probably published in 1999 or 2000. Quick! What’s the basic message of the Bible? Summarize it in as few words as possible…
A Brief Explanation of What a Presbytery Is & Why Pastors in Presbyterian Denominations are Members of Them A belief in the primacy of the local congregation of the Church, I think, reflects the gut feeling of most North American Evangelicals. As a result, the form of Church government universally…
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Would the Son have been incarnate if Adam had not sinned? 1 Corinthians 15:44-45 provides a prooftext for an affirmative answer. Verse 44 says that the “spiritual body” is implied by the existence of the “natural body.” Human beings were created in a natural state, but they were destined from…
Bishop Joseph Butler of Durham worried about the consequences of Locke’s empiricism: “That personality is not a permanent, but a transcient thing: that it lives and dies, begins and ends continually: that no one can any more remain one and the same person two moments together, than two successive moments…
Modernity ignores the social, linguistic, and political context of thought, and the way interest shapes the mind; postmodernity foregrounds all this. Perhaps, but . . . . Descartes said that his travels demonstrates that “all those who hold notions strongly contrary to our own are not for that reason barbarians…
For premoderns - ancients and medievals - there was a homology between the self and the world. Man was seen as microcosm, and, as Seigel puts it, they believed that “the world, like the self, is structured so as to fulfill intelligible moral ends.” The initial shift in early modernity,…
Seigel views with “considerable skepticism” the notion that Descartes constructed “a general theory of the human self and subject on the basis of the cogito .” In his treatise on the Passions of the Soul , Descartes claimed that the soul was linked with the body, which acts on the…
According to Seigel, “Descartes’s view of reason as most pure and solid when it was free of corruption by the world’s confusions implied nothing less than the attempt to break free of all social and cultural experience.” Not for the first time, I wish there were an anthropological history of…
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