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Showing posts from 2010

Is Our Knowledge of God Analogical of Univocal?

As a matter of first principles in apologetics, we can ask, “What does the unbeliever know about God?” However, the biblical apologetic is shaped not only by what Scripture says the unbeliever knows, but also by what it reveals he can know; is capable of knowing, as a believer. So we might also ask, “Is it our hope that the unbeliever can know God as God knows himself or that he can know God reflectively, in a creaturely way?” This is the univocal/analogical problem in Christian epistemology.  The question arises in the context of the structure of human thought. It bears its own unique dilemma. If we stress too excessively that knowledge of God is univocal we run the risk of lowering the incomprehensible God to the level of the finite and make God as one of us. But if we stress too emphatically knowledge of God per analogiam we may very well deprive God of all likeness to the humanity he has created with the result that all we are left with is a barren, abstraction. To a consider

Rousseau and Social Contract

Long before Arendt, we have Jean-Jacques Rousseau attempting freedom without authority in society. Once Rousseau experienced the conversion of his soul from academies and culture to the freedom and warm sentiment of nature, in 1750, he wrote his Discourse (First Discourse), in which he tried to show that the arts and sciences were the result of human vice, not virtue, and the cause of the slippery slope in Europe toward moral decline. He developed this thought further in his second Discourse on the Origins of Inequality , where he set over and against the genuine misery of the social conditions of his day the ideal of the “nature state.”  Here the potential for people living together with the charm of nature as the central defining emblem of life compelled them to live as a free, sane, and good; in peace and solidarity, not in warlike aggression.   In his Social Contract , he envisions the state emerging from a hypothetical contract in which the citizens do not surrender their right

Will Evangelicalism Die or Revive: An Excerpt from My Almost for His Highest

Evangelicalism is dying. The glory of God is ready to depart. As a movement, we're growing more and more content in the world. Rather than preferring to be absent from the body and present with the Lord, far too many of us prefer to be present with the body and with our future plans. We attend church. But mainly our interest is to learn how to improve our own lots in life. We're repeating the error of the impenitent thief on the cross to whom Jesus was only a matter of convenience. You can hear it in our prayers. Entreaties and petitions that once reflected verses of the Bible are now strangely at odds with Holy Writ. The way He taught us to pray, with hearts submitted to his Kingdom rule, are more and more becoming images of modern man and his quest for successful living.  What has become of the spirit of brokenness and humility in our churches? We are forgetting to bow the knee. What has happened to the cry of the penitent thief who, in unassuming contrition, cried from th

Art as a Language and the Social History of Art

Up until the mid-18th century, art functioned as an evolving yet relatively stable language of high culture with a vocabulary of conventional forms (style) and themes (subject matter) familiar both to artists and educated audiences. Because artists used vocabularies already familiar to their audiences, it was possible for them to say something significant and for art to have a serious place within a wider range of overlapping cultural forms and practices such as literature, music, theater, dance, religion, and political festivity. Like all forms of high culture, art also worked not just to reflect shared values but also to redefine them. As an active, creative, inventive force responding to individual patrons, artists, and new social circumstances, art provided a changing, flexible arena in which different social groups could interact, exchange and contest ideas, define new forms of group identity, and formulate new blueprints of "reality" and "maps" for human ex

Vote November 2nd!

"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil, God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act." Dietrich Bonhoeffer   "It does not require a majority to prevail but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set bush fires in people's minds." - Samuel Adams "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson "If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival.  There may be even a worse fate. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves." - Winston Churchill

Did God Kill Homosexuals the Night of Jesus' Birth?

We are all very much aware of the problem of pedophilia within Roman Catholicism. It is my personal view that this problem emanates from the vast presence of homosexuals in the Church of Rome. This general suspicion is not new.   Homosexuals were occasionally condemned by medieval writers, especially monastic writers concerned about the sexual improprieties flourishing in all-male communities sworn to chastity. Citing early Christian authorities, Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (1270-90) goes as far as to describe the annihilation of all “sodomites” on the night of Christ’s birth as one of a series of miraculous announcements of Christ’s birth. The writer enlists Jerome and Augustine for support, though no such statements can be traced to either.  “To these shepherds, then, an angel appeared, and announced to them the birth of the Savior, telling them also how they might find their way to Him. And they heard a multitude of angels singing, 'Glory to God in the highest, a