“A more biblical vision would see the Church as guardian or custodian of the sacred text. Just as the Jews, the Church of the Old Testament, discharged their obligations with regard to the Scriptures, so should the Church under the New Covenant. What God had spoken through His prophets was entrusted to His covenant people. …
A Word Spoken by the Word
“For him [Taylor] as for them, the world itself is a metaphor, the gift of a loving God, and is intended to raise our affections to Him and to make us sing” (Daly, p. 176).
Knowledge Extract
“But what we are experiencing is not the knowledge explosion so often boasted of; it is a torrent of information, made possible by first reducing the known to compact form and then bulking it up again—adding water. That is why the product so often tastes like dried soup” (Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve, p. …
Bible Mongery
“So through a series of complicated circumstances, we have come to the last point, which concerns the handlers or marketers of the text. We see that text of Scripture now established by the neutral Academy, and is afterwards packaged, copyrighted, marketed and sold by hustling and enterprising entrepreneurs. The Church today has no authoritative role …
The Metaphorical Alpha and Omega
“Other Puritan poets, accepting the metaphoric world, worked their way toward metaphor and ended their poems with it. Taylor often begins with metaphor and is left to work his way beyond it and sometimes back to it” (Daly, p. 165).
The Cape and Beret Problem
“By the 1700s, moreover, ‘art’ and ‘artist’ had subtly acquired new meanings. The good or great artist was now understood to possess more than high technical competence, and he had gradually come to feel a special kind of self-regard. The graphic artists particularly demanded freedom of action; when commissioned they would no longer tolerate being …
Another Thing Science Can’t Do
“The reconstruction of the autographic text is a task outside the competence of science, and any attempt to submit the task to scientific canons will only result in increasing confusion. A process of scholarly reconstruction here makes sense only when undergirded with faith in the living God who controls the flow of all historical events. …
No Cartoon Puritan
“Earlier critics have noted [Edward] Taylor’s use of images drawn from the sensible world to figure the invisible things of God, and, after some initial disagreement, later critics have agreed that Taylor was neither a closet idolator nor a crypto-Catholic, but an orthodox New England Puritan, a category that recent scholarship has shown to be …
Pursuing What You Love
“This active use of time is of course for pleasure; its impulse is love. Everybody used to know this when the words amateur and dilettante were taken in their original meanings of ‘lover’ and ‘seeker of delight.’ We have turned them into terms of contempt to denote bunglers and triflers” (Jacques Barzun, The Culture We …
Providentially Protected and Preserved
“So we must understand there are two different approaches to textual work. One expresses confidence that God has protected His Word down through history. This is a faith position — faith in God. The other presupposition says that it is up to man, through neutral, scholarly, and scientific means, to determine what the original text …