“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 …
The Centrality of Puritan Symbolism
“For the Puritan, however, the world in which he lived was symbolic. Things meant . . . Puritan poets saw symbols in the Bible and the world. From these sources they derived not only most of their symbols, but the symbolic method itself, the lens through which they perceived and expressed their own experience. Not …
Margarine of the Arts
“Based on his study of twenty-one world civilizations—ranging from ancient Rome to imperial China, from Babylon to the Aztecs—Toynbee found that societies in disintegration suffer a kind of ‘schism of the soul.’ They are seldom simply overrun by some other civilization. Rather, they commit a kind of cultural suicide. Disintegrating societies, he says, have several …
A False Dilemma
“Of course this should not be taken as anything like approval of any form of sacerdotalism. But if a man is going to base his worship around ceremonies and traditions of human devising, then it makes far better sense, humanly speaking, to opt for the traditions that were invented in the fourth century, as opposed …
The Sensual Puritan
“We can, however, examine Puritan appeals to both the sensuous and the sensual in man. Such an examination reveals that one who believes that Puritans avoided sensuous and even erotic imagery in expressing religious doctrine or describing spiritual states does so in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary” (Daly, p. 22).
Postmodernism Much Larger Than Its Theorists
“Modernism, however, is being replaced by the new secular ideology of postmodernism. This new set of assumptions about reality—which goes far beyond mere relativism—is gaining dominance throughout the culture. The average person who believes that there are no absolutes may never have heard of the academic exercise of ‘deconstruction.’ The intellectual establishment may disdain the …
The Church at the First is the Church at the Last
“But the problem with Eastern Orthodoxy, and also with Rome, is not their antiquity. The problem is that they are not old enough — they are not part of the Ancient Church, characterized in all ages by the righteousness of faith. Abel lived under a different administration of the grace of God than did Moses, …