Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Pneumatology, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, is often formulated along dispensational lines. The Holy Spirit’s work in the Old Testament, we tend to think, was earthly, concerned with political and military leadership, while in the New Testament the Spirit’s work has to do with mediating salvation achieved by Christ.…
Homosexuality and the Love of Death Some years ago (September, 1980) Midge Decter published in Commentary one of the most illuminating pieces that I have ever seen on homosexuality. It was a very autobiographical piece dealing with her own summer vacation experiences on Fire Island off of New Jersey. When…
C. The Battle of Gog and Magog (Ezekiel 38-39) (continued for previous issue) A final corroboration of this interpretive hypothesis comes from what we might call the "Amalek Pattern" in the Bible. Note in Genesis 12-15 that Abram moves into the land after escaping Pharaoh (ch. 12), settles down and…
Speaking of the Church, Romans 11:16-17 says, "And if the root be holy, the branches are also. But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the root of the fatness of the…
But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching (tupos didaskales) to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness (Romans 6:17-18). In his study of the use of…
John Owen (1616-1683), Biblical Theology, or the Nature, Origin, Development, and Study of Theological Truth in Six Books, translated by Stephen P. Westcott (Pittsburgh: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, [1661] 1994), hardcover, 911 pages, $50.00. Here for the first time in English is one of Owen’s most important Latin works, along…
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Continuing through Simon Critchley’s book on Continental philosophy, the following analogy seems to capture some aspects of the contrast of Continental and analytic: Continental is Catholic: conscious of tradition, respectful of saints, aware of historical contextualization. Philosophy is the history of philosophy. Analytic is Protestant: deals with de-contextualized philosophical problems,…
Postmodern critics of modernity sometimes treat the latter not only as the pursuit and ambition for totality; they treat it as a totality, as an undifferentiated whole. But if postmoderns are right, even modernity was fragmented and frayed at the edges, and the appearance of totality is a modernist ruse.…
A subsidiary thesis: Modernity is motivated by a desire for purity, by dirt-avoidance - dirt being, as Mary Douglas says, “matter out of place.” Counter-modernity is dirt’s revenge, celebration of dirt.
Featherstone once again. He points out that sometime in the 18th century, upper class culture divided from lower class culture: “in 1500 the educated strata despised the common people although they shared their culture. Yet by 1800 their descendants had ceased to join spontaneously in popular culture and were rediscovering…
In his 1987 book, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism , C. Campbell attempts to explain the origins of contemporary obsession with novelty, pleasure in the new, self-expression through consumption of goods. He traces it to romanticism’s focus on “imagination, fantasy, mysticism, creativity and emotional exploration” (Featherstone’s…
A couple of further notes from Featherstone’s very stimulating book. First, citing Pierre Bourdieu, he notes the limits of seeing consumption as an isolated marker of status. The signs “that betray a person’s origins and trajectory through life are manifest in body shape, size, weight, stance, walk, demeanour, tone of…
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