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Creation

Maker of Heaven and Earth, (Part 4)

In my previous two posts, I looked at aspects of Psalms 93, 95, 96 and 98 that declare Yahweh, the divine King, to be the world’s own Creator. In my next post, I plan to argue that the creation theology of the sub-section constituted by Psalms 93-100 contributes to the…

by Stephen LongApril 23, 2015
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Otherness

Sexual Difference, Liberal and Christian

Ethika Politika has published a fascinating interview within which the French Catholic philosopher Fabrice Hadjadj discusses his recent work on the subject of sexuality. While there are many points where our lines of reasoning as Protestants will sharply diverge from Hadjadj’s, there is also much that is deeply perceptive in…

by Alastair RobertsApril 21, 2015
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Literature

Macbeth and the Fall of Adam

For anyone in Shakespeare’s audience who knew the real story of Macbeth, his play must have been surprising. Shakespeare changed so many important details of the historical Macbeth’s life that had Raphael Holinshed, the main author of the most popular history of the British Isles in Shakespeare’s day — Holinshed…

by Ralph Allan SmithApril 16, 2015
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Creation

Maker of Heaven and Earth, (Part 3)

I started looking at a sequence of psalms on divine Kingship (Psalms 93-100) in my last post, part of a series looking at the Old Testament’s witness to Yahweh’s exercise of absolute mastery over his cosmos. I am not trying to “prove” a doctrine of creation ex nihilo directly from…

by Stephen LongApril 14, 2015
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Anxiety

(Un)Holy Fear

Most of the time I believe that dread is wise, anxiety righteous, fear a holy thing. It sounds ridiculous, but bear with me. There are days when fear seems to be not only a rational response to my circumstances, but a moral duty. After all, being a grown-up means responsibility.…

by Leta SundetApril 11, 2015
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Psalms

Psalm 36 Commentary

Get the Psalm 36 Translation here Psalm 36 begins with several translation problems. First, the first word in the actual psalm, as it is found in the English text, is the word "oracle." This word also begins the second verse in the medieval Massoretic Hebrew text, which is our basic…

by James B. JordanApril 10, 2015

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Cities Ascending and Descending

The Bible ends with a vision of the descent of a jeweled bridal city Jerusalem descending from heaven. Before the city descends, though. a city ascends: Babylon is destroyed and her smoke rises forever and ever. God's city descends only after the city of man is sent up to God…

August 14, 2015

Anti-Labor, Anti-Catholic

David Sehat argues ( The Myth of American Religious Freedom ) that the American moral establishment was undermined by the labor movement: “By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the corporation had joined the family, the church, and the school as an institution perpetuating Christian moral authority” (189). This…

August 13, 2015

Myth and the Fragmentation of Humanity

Paganism, writes Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy ( Christian Future ), “is best understood . . . as primitive man's response to the fear of death.” That means not only personal death but also the death of those groups to which he is bound—family, race, country. The problem is that “all finite forms…

August 13, 2015

The End For Which God Made Us

“The patristic concept of theosis is the most precise and compendious possible evocation of the end for which God creates us,” writes Robert Jenson in a characteristically dense essay in The Catholicity of the Reformation . It doesn't imply that the Creator-creature distinction is somehow erased; that difference is “indeed…

August 13, 2015

What Cantwell Achieved

David Sehat ( The Myth of American Religious Freedom , 222-3) observes that Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940) was the first Supreme Court decision to incorporate the religion clause of the First Amendment to the States. In the case, Jehovah's Witnesses were denied a license to proselytize. The Court struck down…

August 12, 2015

Creating Genocide

Emmanuel Katongole ( A Future for Africa , 98-101) argues, as others have, that the racial division behind the Rwandan genocide was forged during Western colonization. “Before the colonial occupation of Rwanda,” he writes, “the Hutu and Tutsi were not ‘clearly distinct and rigidly separated ethnic groups.'” The distinction existed,…

August 12, 2015

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