Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
1. Come, Ye Thankful People, Come. This hymn by Henry Alford is found in many hymnals, including Cantus Christi . Yet, the last stanza radically contradicts the theological perspective of the historic faith and of the editors of this hymnal. It is a witness to how we tend to bounce…
This series of post were originally published at the Biblical Horizons blog. The entire paper can be downloaded HERE . 7. The Literary Shape of the Covenant As we have seen, there is a succession of covenants in the Bible, each more glorious than the previous, each absorbing and transfiguring…
This series of post were originally published at the Biblical Horizons blog. The entire paper can be downloaded HERE . 6. Covenant Phases in the Bible Thus far we have spoken of only three phases in the history of the one covenant. We must now divide the third phase into…
This series of post were originally published at the Biblical Horizons blog. The entire paper can be downloaded HERE . 5. Priest, King, and Prophet We can begin with the phrase “prophet, priest, and king.” This is the order normally heard from preachers and theologians. But it is not really…
This is a fine hymn by John Mason Neale, based on an ancient Greek church hymn. The opening question is particularly powerful: “Christian, dost thou see them on the holy ground, how the powers of darkness compass thee around?” Yes, the devil strikes in the very church and her worship…
This syrupy piece of marijuana-haze hymnody is found in the hymnals of churches that have substituted sentiment for orthodoxy and worship. Hence you don’t find it in older Presbyterian hymnals, but in the Trinity Hymnal. Nor do you find it in Episcopal and Lutheran hymnals until very recently in some…
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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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