Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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Ibsen, Steiner argues, did not write tragedies. Ibsen wrote “dramatic rhetoric” calling society to reform. For real tragedy, there is no such “solution” to be found, there is no remedy, except destructive sacrifice and perhaps a deus ex machina. From this angle, tragedy is perhaps among the STOICHEIA that prepared…
Some more quotations from Steiner’s Death of Tragedy : “We cannot understand the romantic movement if we do not perceive at the heart of it the impulse toward drama . . . . The romantic mode is neither an ordering nor a criticism of life; it is a dramatization. And…
Some thoughts on NT Wright’s Rutherford House Lecture, August 2003. I have little disagreement with much of the lecture, and it clarified a number of things for me. Wright’s views on justification, however, continue to puzzle me at a number of points. Here’s an attempt to clarify my (or NTW’s)…
Some thoughts on NT Wright’s Rutherford House Lecture, August 2003. I have little disagreement with much of the lecture, and it clarified a number of things for me. Wright’s views on justification, however, continue to puzzle me at a number of points. Here’s an attempt to clarify my (or NTW’s)…
Steiner notes that, following the Renaissance, European drama operated under the shadows of neo-classical and Elizabethan dramatic practice, the former “closed” and rigidly adhering to Aristotelian criteria, the other open and experimental. He discusses the theory of Thomas Rymer (a neo-classicist) at some length, concluding that the controversies that Rymer…
George Steiner in his Death of Tragedy describes the “Shakespearean difference” as mainly due to Shakespeare’s avoidance of fascination with Hellenic models: “The neo-classic view [which rigidified Aristotelian conceptions of tragedy] expresses a growing perception of the miracle of Greek drama. This perception was fragmentary. There were few translations of…
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