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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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Clever Drudge

Drudge couldn’t care a whit for Hillary Clinton, but his increasingly provocative headlines (most recently, “Diss-Off”) for a story on how Obama never considered Hillary as a veep candidate can have only one result: To get Hillary’s supporters, already cool toward Obama, hopping mad.

August 22, 2008

Enlightenment and elementary principles

Kant regards positive religions or ecclesiastical faiths (including Christianity) as temporary moral crutches that we can shed as we approach the pure natural religion of reason. Christianity’s institutions, sacraments, dogmas, are the stoicheia leading us to enlightenment. Here we see the problematics of Christian sacramental theology, going back at least…

August 22, 2008
Philosophy

Changing past and realism

Weberman returns to Danto to advance his argument. He notes that Danto shies away from saying that past events change, and suggests that he did this in order to remain a realist about past events; Danto held that “past events are what they are in a mind-independent way.” He insists…

August 19, 2008
Philosophy

Nonfixity of past

In an article in the Review of Metaphysics (1997), David Weberman argues for the “nonfixity of the historical past.” He starts from Arthur Danto’s argument that historical inquiry and writing cannot be a reconstruction available to an “ideal chronicler” who knows everything that happens the moment it happens and sets…

August 19, 2008

Union card

E. Miner wrote, that “the ability to declare typology absent is a kind of proof of sound modern critical method.” Which translated means, Skepticism about typology is the union card of serious biblical scholarship.

August 19, 2008

Brick Hermeneutics

A. K. A. Adam offers a useful critique of what he calls “brick hermeneutics.” Taking a cue from George Herriman’s early 20th-century comic strip Krazy Kat, he describes brick hermeneutics as follows: “Most of our discourses take for granted the premise that we communicate by infusing ‘meaning’ into some expression,…

August 19, 2008

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