“The church at Rome has many ancient glories, but what does it have the Jerusalem did not have? . . . Now in response to this, Rome would maintain that she is far more than just a particular church in a particular city, that she is not just a branch on the tree, but rather …
Deep Metaphor
“In focusing on the metaphorical nature of the physical world and the metaphorical language of the Bible, Taylor was moving toward an understanding of meditation as a literary, as well as a religious, exercise. And he knew it” (Daly, p. 73).
How the Postmodern Giant Cooked and Ate Itself
“The contemporary academic world is busily deconstructing the human. Modernism took as its project the death of God. David Levin shows how postmodernism takes the next step. Keeping the idea that God is dead, postmodernism has as its project the death of the self” (Gene Edward Veith, Postmodern Times, p. 73).
Another Table of Contents Problem
“Put simply, my challenge contains two questions. Has the Roman Catholic church made infallible pronouncements throughout her history? And may we have an infallible and complete list of them? (Mother Kirk, p. 32).
A Plain Man’s Path
“Though its abuse could lead them from Him, its proper religious use was a ‘plain man’s pathway to heaven.’ It offered the plain poet a world rich in intrinsic symbols, correspondences, and significances that were not decorations but necessary parts of the truth he attempted to tell” (Daly, p. 71).
And Power Corrupts
“These new models tend to be adopted without the demands for rigorous evidence required by traditional scholarship. If Euro-centrism is a fault, one would think Afro-centrism would be similarly narrow-minded. If patriarchy is wrong, why would matriarchy be any better? But these quibbles miss the point of postmodern scholarship. Truth is not the issue. The …
A Theology of the Table of Contents
“The problem with contemporary Protestants is that they have no real doctrine of the Table of Contents. With the approach that is popular in conservative evangelical circles, one simply comes to the Bible by means of an epistemological lurch. The Bible ‘just is,’ and any questions about how it got here are dismissed as a …
Puritan Poetry: Crammed With Images
“The fear of graven images was an obsession with the Puritans. Like most of their obsesssions, however, it resulted, not in the childish dogmatism imputed to them by nineteenth-century commentators, but in a consistent system of clear, taut, definitions and distinctions . . . A verbal idol, such as might be found in poetry, would …
Choosing Your Own Designer History, One That Works for You
“Since there is no objective truth, history may be rewritten according to the needs of a particular group. If history is nothing more than ‘a network of agonistic [i.e., fighting, contending] language games,’ then any alternative ‘language game’ that advances a particular agenda, that meets ‘success’ in countering institutional power, can pass as legitimate history. …
No More Inspired Than the Maps and Concordance, But Still Authoritative
“But when we open our Bibles, before we come to the Word of God at Genesis 1:1, we come to the word of the Church at the Table of Contents. No one holds that the Table of Contents is part of inspired Scripture; rather it points to inspired Scripture, in a similar way that John …