Genesis 1:26-28 (ESV) 26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful... Read more
The spirit of Marcion is with us to the present day. Marcion you may recall was a heretic. He was also urbane, spiritually minded, and he believed in a loving God. That’s why he thought the God of the Old Testament with all the wrath, blood, and intolerance had to go. He took it upon himself to expunge Christianity of all its Jewishness. The relationship of the Testaments has always been a subject that divides Christians. I recall as a... Read more
When it comes to what the Bible means by taking dominion Tom Bombadil comes to mind for me; but I think what comes to mind for most people looks a lot more like Saruman. If you’re a reader of Lord of the Rings, you got those references. But if you’ve only seen the films, you probably didn’t–at least not the reference to Bombadil. Poor Bombadil, what’s he in the story for anyway? (Peter Jackson, the director of the films thought... Read more
We live in a world where the givens of family life no longer can be received as givens. They must be justified to modern people. Longtime readers of this blog know I am an apologist for traditional ways, especially home ways. I’ve long felt that more is at stake with the loss of traditional ways than is generally believed. Some of my co-belligerents defend them strictly to preserve the goodness of creation–natural law and all that. But I believe that... Read more
One of the conceptual blocks I ran into as a young convert was the notion that freedom is subject to morality. Like just about everyone else I considered freedom to be amoral, or even better the highest moral value only grudgingly hemmed in by the freedom of other people. Only later would I come to see that my convictions (if they could even be called convictions) were the same as the Utilitarians–people like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill–who saw... Read more
Christian family-based religious life is so dissimilar to the practices of biblical patriarchs there are times I wonder if we can consider them patriarchs at all. (Patriarchs are ruling fathers after all, and we certainly don’t seem to submit to them or resemble them.) My previous posts in this series of reflections on Joseph C. Atkinson’s Biblical and Theological Foundations of the Family show just how much the patriarchs expected of family life and just how little we do in... Read more
I have long suspected that the real reason American evangelicals are so ignorant about the Old Testament is because it doesn’t support the individualistic and private religion they prefer. Often when you hear someone say something like this you may safely assume that an advocate of the welfare state is about to use evangelicals as a foil for increasing the soft-totalitarianism progressives prefer. If that’s your fear, not to worry. For me Sweden is hell on earth (like Dante’s lowest... Read more
I am pleased to present a podcast of Radio Free Christendom in which I am interviewed by my friend Steven Wedgeworth. The interview addresses reaching men, why the Industrial Revolution precipitated the crisis of masculinity, why Mark Driscoll is sort of goofy, and why the traditional role of men in the household is important for understanding how salvation works. (In other words, more rides on masculinity than a man’s ego.) The interview is about 45 minutes long and is... Read more
Sometimes you learn the importance of something because you have it and can’t imagine life without it. Other times you learn its importance because you don’t have it and can’t imagine life with it. When it comes to family, I was once the second sort of person. My father abandoned my mother, my sister, and me on a cold January morning in an apartment with no heat. He said he’d be back, but he never returned. I was eleven years... Read more
We must live our lives in a larger structure of meaning than we can build for ourselves. If as a father you cannot trust popular culture to provide it for you, where do you look for it? It is more or less assumed that traditional notions of fatherhood have been debunked. Those of us who happened to be more traditionally minded have been looking for ways to re-valorize fatherhood for a long time. Back during the 1980s and 90s Dr. James... Read more
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