“Indeed, the only way to say anything about God’s glory is through the creatures, through metaphor, a literary device implicit in God’s creation and sanctioned by its use in Scripture . . . A system of metaphors made by God and explicated in the Bible, the world itself had its place in salvation history” (Daly, …
Ecclesiastical Wanna-Bees
“Every age has had its eager-to-please liberal theologians who have tried to reinterpret Christianity according to the latest intellectual and cultural fashion” (Gene Edward Veith, Postmodern Times, p. xii).
Cain Was the Eldest
“The Church which Christ purchased with His blood is not the only thing which is ‘of old.’ Scripture shows us the serpent has been lying from the beginning (1 Jn.3:8; Rev. 12:9). The truth is ancient, but within the experience of our race, lies are almost as ancient. The antithesis between true righteousness and self-righteousness, …
Heavenly Pleasures On Earth
“God has bridged the gap between heaven and earth. Joys of heaven and joys of earth come from the same Creator and are sufficiently similar that one can be used to describe the other. Indeed Steere reversed the usual metaphoric equation by asserting not that heaven would be a garden of earthly delights but that …
He Who Loses His Life Will Save It
“But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself …
Too Many Kinds of Pleasure
“The real objection to a merely hedonistic theory of literature, or of the arts in general, is that ‘pleasure’ is a very high, and therefore very empty, abstraction. It denotes too many things and connotes too little. If you tell me that something is a pleasure, I do not know whether it is more like …
So Define “Old”
“This desire to belong to an old church is certainly a noble and scriptural one. ‘Remember thy congregation, which thou hast purchased of old; the rod of thinke inheritance, which thou hast redeemed; this mount Zion, where thou hast dwelt’ (Ps. 74:2). But at the same time, caution is in order. Someone with a pressing …
Aesthetic Puritanism
“Even in the plastic arts, then, the Puritans were willing to record the truth as they saw it and to appreciate the beauty of that record. On gravestones, in meeting houses, and in the works of over two hundred poets, they were not, in Moses Coit Tyler’s words, ‘at war with nearly every form of …
Good Will on the First Page
“There is no work in which holes can’t be picked; no work that can succeed without a preliminary act of good will on the part of the reader” (C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, p. 116).
Life in the Provinces
“If a man is redeemed by Christ, then he is a member of this one Church — a Church founded in God’s decree before time existed, and by the grace of God manifested in history as long as sinful heirs of Adam have lived. Enter the modern rootless evangelical, who, with a bemused detachment, is …