Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The story of Judges 19 and the subsequent chapters are some of the most shocking and appalling accounts in all of Scripture. The callousness of the old host and the Levite, and the monstrous brutality of the men of Gibeah, leaves us feebly scrabbling for words by which to surmount…
David has become king. He has conquered the capital city of Jerusalem. He has brought the ark of Yahweh into the city and placed it in a tent. He has stationed Levites at the tent to offer sacrifices of praise. An anomaly hits him: He has a cedar-paneled palace, and…
In Part 2 of this series we traced what we have of the development of the epiclesis in the liturgy of the Church. In this third and final part we’ll look at the theological implications of this and how we may apply what we’ve learned. As we saw in Part…
In a 2014 piece published in First Things , I offered a "wish list" for Protestant churches, a checklist for a future catholic Protestantism. The wish list doesn't cover everything. It doesn't mention those things that Protestants, especially Evangelicals, already do, often exceedingly well, things like missions and evangelism and…
In the first part of this series we examined the meaning of “blessing” in Scripture and its parallels in Jewish liturgical tradition, but did not find anything that we could properly call an epiclesis (an invocation of the Holy Spirit). We did find examples of invocation of Jesus to “come”…
When the Aaronic priests were ordained, the blood of the ram of "filling” was placed on the lobe of the right ear, the right thumb, and the right big toe (Lev. 8:22-24). Similarly, the cleansing rite for a leper included smearing the right ear lobe, thumb, and big toe with…
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A pure heart is one that is not contaminated by base motives. It is a undivided heart. 50,000 of the sons of Zebulun were in David’s army, and they “could draw up in battle formation with all kinds of weapons of war and helped David with an undivided heart” (1…
Samuel Johnson says that “all appropriated terms of art should be sunk in general expressions, because poetry is to speak a general language.” Barfield disagrees: “Johnson was hopelessly wrong.” What poets do above all is express things in terms that are not general: “They express, as nearly as any word…
Barfield thinks it’s disastrous to oppose poetry and science “as two fundamentally opposite modes of experiencing Life.” Among other things, it spoils art: “For it leads straight to that Crocean conception of art as meaningless emotion - as personal emotion symbolized - which is so poisonous in its charter to…
Barfield responds to critics who charge that his attention to individual words “is a precious and dilettante kind of criticism.” He says “the reverse is the truth” and further argues that “Words whose meanings are relatively fixed and established, words which can be defined - words, that is, which are…
Guy de Maupassant says, “Les mots ont une ame . . . . Il faut trouver cette ame qui apparait au contact d’autres mots” (Words have a soul . . . . It is necessary to find this soul which appears at contact with other words). Owen Barfield, who quotes…
Hamann opposed the abstractionism of the Enlightenment partly by emphasizing the centrality of sexuality in language, experience, and thought. He called himself a “spermatologist” in the sense that he was sowing seeds and in the sense that the thought of the relation of revelation and reason in sexual terms: “our…
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