Khaled Anatolios points out in his Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine that Athanasius charges that the Arians cannot truly honor God as Creator. The reasoning is: “If the Word is Creator and the Word is extrinsice to the divine essence, then the creative . . . . Continue Reading »
Make allowances for Schmemann’s settled anti-Western bias, but there is still a lot to be said for his account of the rise of secularism in the West. Its roots lie in the abandonment of the eschatological character of early Christianity: “It replaced the tension, essential in the early . . . . Continue Reading »
Peter James ( Centuries of Darkness: A Challenge to the Chronology of Old World Archaeology ) notes: Going Ussher one better, “Dr John Lightfoot, author of the wonderfully titled A Few and New Observations on the book of Genesis, the most of them certain, the rest probably, all harmless, . . . . Continue Reading »
Jonathan Edwards writes in his Personal Narrative about his delight in nature, and then went off into an allegorical reverie: “The soul of the true Christian . . . appeared like such a little white flower as we see in the spring of the year; low and humble on the ground, opening its bosom to . . . . Continue Reading »
Ephrem the Syrian on Genesis 1: “The Holy Spirit warmed the waters with a kind of vital warmth, even bringing them to a boil through intense head in order to make them fertile. The action of a hen is similar. It sits on its eggs, making them fertile through the warmth of incubation. Here . . . . Continue Reading »
Bavinck says, in defense of the necessity of anthropomorphism, that “We simply must acknowledge that even thought our finite understanding of God is limited, it is no less true! We possess exhaustive knowledge of very little; all reality, including the visible and physical, remains something . . . . Continue Reading »
The Farrer quotations come pouring in. OK, trickling. Here’s one from a reader, Jeff Peterson: “Man, once endowed with speech, starts making an inventory of the universe. The speaker, having labelled everything else, labels himself, and becomes an item on his own list. He is now no more . . . . Continue Reading »
In City of God 5.11, Augustine rhapsodizes concerning the works of God the Triune Creator. His works are works of gift-giving. Three times Augustine uses the verb “gave” ( dedit ), and the gifts go from angels to men to animals to seeds to stones, and include intellectual gifts, beauty, . . . . Continue Reading »
Barth says or implies that human language is “in itself” inadequate to the task of bearing God’s revelation. It has to be commandeered in order to become the vehicle of revelation. Language “can only be the language of the world” though we must have confidence that . . . . Continue Reading »
Song of Songs 8:6-7: Put me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm. For love is as strong as death, jealousy is as severe as Sheol; its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the LORD. Many waters cannot quench love, nor will rivers overflow it; if a man were to give all the . . . . Continue Reading »
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