Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
As Adam and Eve walked to the center of the Garden of Eden to meet with the LORD on their first Sabbath they conversed about the origin and age of the earth. Adam: You know, honey, we spent a lot of time yesterday making preparations for our house, and we…
Some of our forefathers believed in reading/singing the psalms in order. Today, when the psalms are even used at all, they tend to be used randomly, though sometimes tied to a church calendar or to the pastor’s sermon. The Bible does not bind us to any particular practice, but there…
Dr. Collins begins his essay with a brief statement of the Day Age view and then a brief statement of the Six Day view, focussing on the challenge to that view posed by modern "science." He ends this discussion by writing: "Two crucial points are at stake here: first, the…
In his The Construction of Social Reality , Berkeley philosopher John Searle puzzles over the ontology of the products of human construction. Certain things – granite, platypi, weeping willows – occur naturally; while other realities – stone walls, zoos and parks, Chase Manhattan Bank – exist only as products of…
In the journal Presbyterion 20 (1994):109-130, published by Covenant Theological Seminary, Dr. C. John Collins sets forth a revision of the Day Age approach in his essay, "How Old Is the Earth? Anthropomorphic Days in Genesis 1:1–2:3." Dr. Collins’s essay has been widely accepted in evangelical Presbyterian circles as an…
The Righteousness of Shem and Japheth As noted above, the action of Shem and Japheth was purely symbolic. They did not need to cover Noah with a garment, for he was already covered by the tent. Their action was a symbolic affirmation of Noah’s authority, a symbolic rejection of Ham’s…
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That’s Barthes not Barth. As in Roland. Prickett suggests that Barthes’ proclamation of the death of the author, his manumission of interpretation from the obsession with the limited, final, “secret” meaning, and his hope for a liberated “anti-theological” and “revolutionary” reading that refuses “to fix meaning” in fact opens the…
Poststructuralism likes to think itself radical, but Stephen Prickett (Words and the Word) points out that it excludes the possibility of novelty. Barthes says that a text is “a tissue of quotations drawn from the unnumerable centres of culture.” And Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality, on Prickett’s reading, encloses a text…
A few highlights from James Wood’s chapter on language in How Fiction Works . Early on, he mentions the “old modernist hope” that prose can be “as well written as poetry.” This will require readers and novelists to develop what Nietzsche called a “third ear”: “We have to read musically,…
Lewis remarks on the high difficulty of adverse criticism, noting that the difficulty lies partly in the fact that the defects of bad literature are found in good literature: “The novel before you is bad - a transparent compensatory fantasy projected by a poor, plain woman, erotically starving. Yes, but…
Lewis describes the process by which words that once expressed and aroused emotions by appealing to the imagination have been emptied of image-content and become purely emotional. “Damn you” used to be a real curse, because people believed in damnation. Now that fewer do, it’s a more or less purely…
In Lewis’s defense, he is trying to explain some of the limits of language, which are worth noting (this in the last chapter of Studies in Words ). One limitation has to do with language’s inability “to inform us about complex physical shapes and movements. Hence descriptions of such things…
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