Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Every attempt to understand the Christian sacraments makes use of comparisons or analogies with other rituals, events, or customs. Calvin and those who followed him, for example, spoke of the sacraments as “seals,” and compared them to the “seal of approval” that an official impresses on a document. Thinking about…
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy has pointed out in his essay "Hitler and Israel, or On Prayer" (available for $2.00 from Biblical Horizons ) that it is God’s word "No!" that establishes in a culture the distinction between the Creator and the creature. The Bible repeatedly says "No!" to every human attempt to…
If you missed Gattaca at the movie theaters, you can probably check it out from your local video store now. And you should. This is one of those relatively rare thought-provoking movies that can stand being watched with brain in gear more than once. It is also poetic, sensitive, visually…
Part 4: The Nephilim Factor Western Civilization partakes of what I call "the Nephilim Factor." The Enoch Factor means that the pagans get there first. This is both a blessing and a danger. As a blessing, it means that they work out techniques of dominion over the lower creation that…
The Worship Service Then the one speaking with me took me by the hair and lifted me into the air in the middle of the great room. And as I watched, I saw people entering the room to the sound of the great bells outside. Then entered from all four…
Part 3: Philosophy (continued) If we realize that human beings are the images of God, and that man hates God, then we realize that all non-Christian political philosophy is founded on a fundamental hatred of other human beings, a hatred manifest in contempt. Rome, like Enoch, was founded on the…
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R. Fischer says, “The relativity of our reference point can be demonstrated by taking a moving picture of a plant at one frame a minute and then speeding it up to thirty frames a second. The plant will appear to behave like an animal, clearly perceiving stimuli and reacting to…
Barbara Adam points out that the leading metaphors for nature in the seventeenth and eighteenth century were mechanical. Creation was a clock. By the nineteenth century, though, steam technology had taken over the European imagination, and metaphors of “letting off steam” and “safety valve” were applied to social and psychological…
My review of Matthew Levering’s latest book is up at First Things : http://www.firstthings.com.
Behind much of today’s biotechnology is the (Newtonian?) notion that living organisms are machine-like. And living organisms can look like machines in some respects. But they aren’t. Barbara Adam points out that the cells of our bodies are incessantly self-renewing - our limbs aren’t like gears that stay the same…
Summarizing findings in physics and biology that should inform social science, Barbara Adam writes, “All organisms, from single cells to human beings and even ecosystems, display rhythmic behaviour. Rhythmicity is a universal phenomenon. Scientists conceptualise atoms as probability waves, molecules as vibrating structures, and organisms as symphonies. Living beings, they…
KG Denbigh wrote in 1981 that physics treats time as a simple continuum: “It knows of no means of picking out a unique moment, the now or the present. The t-coordinate is an undifferentiated continuum, and, if this coordinate is ‘taken for real’ as has been the tendency among many…
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