Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For years I have read little posts by fresh new Papal converts that assert that Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, etc., believed in the perpetual virginity of Mary. So did Turretin. Setting aside the question of whether these men believed that this notion was important or not — and Calvin, at least,…
The previous discussion led to several points that I’d like to take up in like to take up in more detail. For the sake of discussion, I’ll number them for ease of consideration. 1. Typological “evidences” for Mary as perpetual virgin, queen of heaven, etc. etc. I assert here that…
BMEV, or “Blessed Mary Ever-Virgin,” should not be an issue for any Protestant today, but clamor from various quarters means that we need once again to “get real” with the Biblical data here. Herewith is a reworking of a recent essay on the subject originally published in Biblical Horizons. Early…
When I hear from time to time of some young evangelical Presbyterian going into Roman Catholicism, I ask myself, “Why bother? You’re already in a church pretty much like what the Reformers rejected.” In the Medieval church, the congregation did little but watch while the priest and choir did everything.…
The “New Perspective” sheds light on what the New Testament means by the “mystery” of God. The mystery theme is quite pervasive in the apostolic writings, and shows up across genre lines, in the gospels, the epistles, and Revelation. One could even make a solid case that the revelation of…
THIS should be a link to the Sanctus I put together for use at the Biblical Horizons Conferences. Some churches have been using it also.
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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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