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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Angels

Michael’s Dispute with the Devil

But Michael the archangel, when he disputed with the devil and argued about the body of Moses, did not dare pronounce against him a railing judgment, but said, "The Lord rebuke you" (Jude 9). Jude 9 raises several difficulties (though not insuperable difficulties) for conservative commentators. The event that Jude…

by Peter LeithartFebruary 22, 1989
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Angels

Who Were the Angels of Jude 6?

The prophecy of Jude concerns apostasy. An illustration of apostasy and its consequences is found in verse 6, which the New American Standard Bible translates this way: "And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for…

by James B. JordanJanuary 12, 1989
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Biblical Studies

The Mosaic Law and Social Issues

One of the most pressing problems facing Christians today is how the faith relates to the crises of our civilization. On all sides, Christian spokesmen are trying to offer solutions and perspectives on social issues, in order to try and reform our degenerating society. Abortion, pornography, homosexuality, immigration, war, criminal…

by James B. JordanJanuary 12, 1989
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Uncategorized

ZIKLAG BIVOUAC

In the last several months, a number of people have written or phoned to ask me why I and the other men of Geneva Ministries are remaining in a tiny Presbyterian denomination, rather than joining a large, historic, liturgical body. The question arises, it seems, because in my writings and…

by James B. JordanOctober 23, 1985
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Advent

The Menace of Chinese Food

One of the unrecognized and most deadly evils of modern life’s facets is Chinese food. Most people are wholly unaware of the critical nature of the Chinese food question, and blithely continue to participate in this wicked and dangerous activity: eating Chinese food. Of course, to speak against such a…

by James B. JordanDecember 12, 1984
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Essential/Accidental Meaning

Gracia’s own suggestion is that we can make sense of the determinateness and indeterminateness of meaning by distinguishing between “essential” and “accidental” meanings: “although texts may have a well-delimited core of meaning (an essential meaning), they may have other meanings that are the result of contingent conditions, such as changes…

June 6, 2008

No Smoking

In the entry on meaning in the Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible (Baker), Jorge Gracia responds to the view that textual meaning has no limits with this: It is true that “texts are understood by different persons, or even by the same person at different times, to mean…

June 6, 2008

Tallis

Joel Garver writes, in response to several posts from Raymond Tallis’s Not Saussure : “Most post-structuralist authors I’ve read aren’t dealing with things such as cups or trees or rocks, but rather things such as rationality, madness, criminality, virtue, etc. Foucault, for instance, seems to take bodies as ontologically basic,…

June 5, 2008
Literature

Bible and poetry

Fisch yet again: After reviewing the influence of the Old Testament, especially the Psalms, on prose writing in the seventeenth century, he adds: “it is worth bearing in mind that this is not only a matter of the seventeenth century. It is found earlier in the antiphonal plain-song of the…

June 5, 2008
Literature

Hebraic prose

Fisch again: Hebraic prose is different from the grand style of the sixteenth century, and different too from the pared-down plain style shared by many Puritans and all Baconians. It is a rhetoric, not an anti-rhetoric, but it is a rhetoric purified by Puritanism, Senecanism, and scientism. It is biblical…

June 5, 2008
Literature

Jerusalem and Albion

In his 1964 book, Jerusalem and Albion: The Hebraic Factor in Seventeenth-Century Literature , Harold Fisch argues that Blake provides a more insightful and broader account of the seventeenth century’s “dissociation of sensibility” than Eliot, who coined the phrase. For Blake, the great crisis of England was the dissociation of…

June 5, 2008

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