Category: Theology
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Merry Christmas, Figure It Out
There are good Christmases, but none perfect, because Christmas, more than any other season, vibrates with the tension between the “already” and the “not yet”, those two polarities that make up the Kingdom. The “not yet” of Christmas never totally gives way to the “already”, because the first Christmas Day, for those who lived it, felt utterly…
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Like father, Like Father.
The devaluation of father and the death of God are the same thing. Or, at least, they comfort each other. They share an elective affinity. I’m not arguing causality here, in either direction. I don’t know that devaluing father causes the ideology of God’s death. Nor do I know that atheism leads to…
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The Time Toggle
\[[Alienation and the feeling of time]] Work over a drawing or a poem and all sense of passing time is suspended. The next day, watch television all evening, and you’re surprised at how fast the evening goes. These are common observations, common enough that we can state the principle: when the senses are…
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Straw Atonement Theories
One of the dilettante hobbies of the secular liberati is mocking a god who doesn’t exist and who Christians should hate if he did exist. But it is an amusing hobby, and so persists. These cheap thrills take many forms – for example, the atonement, as imagined by those who hate the very idea of…
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“In the word, the thought.”
Athanasius: “the Son is in the Father . . . because the whole being of the Son is proper to the Father’s ousia, as radiance from light and a stream from a fountain; so that whosoever sees the Son, sees what is proper to the Father and knows that the Son’s being, as from the…
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“In Remembrance of Me.”
The Old Testament injunction to “Remember God” is the equivalent of the New Testament “faith”.
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There is a Child
There is a Child There is a child who walks in the treetops at daybreak and at dusk. He prefers the company of birds to that of men, so few men have seen him, though some have heard him chortle as he slides down the back side of the sky on his way home, beyond…
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The Flaming Sword
There is no return from exile unless transgression is undone. Any attempt to return to the garden without a blood atonement cheapens the transgression. It’s like a man who turns from a whore to kiss his wife. The affront is as vile as the infidelity. His wife should vomit in his mouth. A sword…
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The Moral Meaning of Individual Deaths
Some believe souls survive death, and some don’t. The two premises are nakedly adversarial assertions: “there is life after death”, and “this is all there is”. These two religious positions are so far apart that discussion cannot bridge them. These are the two camps that make up the human race, and many moral and political…