"As far as theology is concerned, “www” might stand for “wild, wild west.” Whatever law may hold sway in the civilized territories of academic theology, it is unenforceable out on the range. Internet theology, unlike other academic disciplines, has not been guided or normalized by the presence of any established institutional presence. With a few exceptions, the most ...
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Nearly every culture dreamed of it: a virgin would conceive, a god would come to Earth and show us justice, and healing and peace would come at last to mankind.
Nobody could make all of the elements work into one great story, but humanity knew what we needed. We dreamed of it, longed for it, tasted it in the sweat of daily life.
Reality finally took a hand and the Love t...
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Phoebe age 4 steps up to representational drawing just in time for the Christmas season. You can pick out the human figures to the left and the right, especially if you're prepared for the bold abstraction of showing all the hairs on their heads by portraying one representative hair. Which one is Mary and which one is Joseph? "I don't know... I forgot," says the 4-year ...
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If God performed a mighty act of salvation in sending his Son, then we have to interpret the helpless baby of Bethlehem as the conqueror who showed God's salvation to all the ends of the earth. Filling out so sharp a paradox is a big challenge for the poetic imagination, but a few have attempted it. Chief among them is Robert Southwell (1561-1595), who crafted the second hal...
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Happy endings require love, but the love folks are looking for is either in short supply or surprisingly unsatisfying when found. Christmas is a holiday for loving the movies tell us, but love is pretty hard to find.
As Love Actually points out “love is all around” in virtual reality, but there is too little love in reality and it is too limited scope. Instead of love b...
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A little drawing of a boy getting a nutcracker toy soldier for Christmas, you say? Carried out with characteristic verve, but in the unpromising medium of #2 pencil and crumpled yellow legal pad? No, no, no, there is much more going on here.
Attend to the actual placement of the image on the page. The top blue line and the left red lines define the active picture plane...
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"O sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvellous things. His right hand and his holy arm have worked salvation for him."
Clearly Psalm 98 is a psalm about salvation. The word "salvation" occurs three times in a consistet translation of the first three verses (KJV and others interpret the word salvation in verse 1 as "victory," which blunts the force of the re...
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Christmas always brings out the cynics in modern times and it is no wonder.
Children grow up watching Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, or some other fairy tale, but seeing their parents divorce, political leaders lie, and hearing “grown up” media sneer at their movies. Disney promises that if they follow their heart, then all their dreams will come true. But even if th...
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Psalm 98 breaks down nicely into three parts: Verses 1-3 tell you why to praise God: Because of the marvelous deeds of salvation he has done. Verses 4-6 tell you how to praise: Loudly, joyfully, with guitars and trumpets. Then verses 7-9 say who should praise: The sea, the world, the rivers, the hills, which must mean everybody and the ground they're standing on.
The psalm...
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"Oh sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvellous things." -- Psalm 98:1
Psalm 98 is a remarkable Psalm, and according to an ancient Christian tradition, it is a Christmas Psalm, an Old Testament text that is appropriate for reading at this time of year.
What’s Christmassy about it, you might ask. Read through it: there are no shepherds or wise men, no...
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Note on the origins of the manuscript:
Yesterday I was working on a manuscript related to Plato’s view of time and eternity in Timaeus. My daughter was playing Christmas music in the other room just as I was translating the odd section on numbers that puzzled even A.E. Taylor. Mary Kate hit a chord . . . just as I was puzzling aloud about the text. As I spoke the following...
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The January 2007 issue of First Things is already available, and in the "Briefly Noted" section you'll find my review of Alexander the Corrector, a book about Alexander Cruden of Cruden's Concordance fame. The editors at First Things snipped a few words here and there to make it fit better, generally improving the review. If you don't subscribe to First Things you're missing...
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Last week I was asked to give a talk in one of the dormitories here on campus entitled "A Theology of Christmas." Realizing that tired university students likely did not want to hear a three-hour theological discourse in the midst of finals week I thought long and hard about how to talk about Christmas theologically. To help me get at the topic I decided that the only sources I...
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