Timothy Gorringe ( A Theology of the Built Environment: Justice, Empowerment, Redemption ) summarizes Barth’s idea of “divine spatiality”: “God’s ‘eminent spatiality’ . . . grounds our own created spatiality. Space, in other words, is not something contingent, something which will one day be annihilated and ‘be no more,’ because it has its true and intrinsic ground in God. God is present to other things, and is able to create and give them space, because God in Godself [ugh! -PJL]... Read more
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 receive the pleasant beams of the sun’s glory; rejoicing as it were in a calm rapture; diffusing around a sweet fragrancy; standing peacefully and lovingly,... Read more
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 then, the Holy Spirit foreshadows the sacrament of holy baptism, prefiguring its arrival, so that the waters made fertile by the hovering of the same divine... Read more
In a fascinating discussion of Enrique Martinez Celaya’s painting Thing and Deception in his God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art (Cultural Exegesis) , Daniel Siedell quotes Martinez Celaya’s comments: “I chose a seemingly banal image, a chocolate bunny rabbit with all its reference to childhood, treat and wish. It is magnified until it is larger than a human and then it is broken, with visible seams. The rabbit by itself is both sentimental and resistant to... Read more
Hobson believed that the imperial scramble was driven by the need for capitalists to find new areas for investment. Unlike Lenin, who used his theories and data, Hobson did not think that imperialism was the inevitable result of capitalist expansion. The problem was oversavings by capitalists and under-consumption by the mass of the population (of Britain especially). If the people of Britain had the resources, they could consume an almost limitless supply of goods and services. The key to undermining... Read more
In his classic study of Imperialism , JA Hobson distinguished between colonialism and nationalism. Colonialism “consists in the migration of part of a nation to vacant or sparsely peopled foreign lands,” and thus is “a genuine expansion of nationality” and nationalism. With imperialism, however, few citizens of one nation re-settle into another, and those who do migrate “form a small minority wielding political or economic sway over a majority of alien and subject people.” The innovation of nineteenth-century Imperialism, though,... Read more
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 of a mystery to us. Our talk of spiritual matters, including those of our own souls, is necessarily metaphorical, figurative, poetic. But this does not mean that what we say is untrue and incorrect. On... Read more
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 of a mystery to us. Our talk of spiritual matters, including those of our own souls, is necessarily metaphorical, figurative, poetic. But this does not mean that what we say is untrue and incorrect. On... Read more
Bonaventure said that we must transfer “to the divine that which pertains to the creature.” This is no unfortunate necessity. Rather, “God’s glory requires this transference. For, since God is greatly to be praised, lest he should ever lack praise because of the scarcity of words, Holy Scripture has taught us that the names of creatures – indefinite in number – should be transferred to God, in order that jut as every creature glorifies God, so also every name that... Read more
The Cappadocians described the personal distinctions within God by reference to “relations of origin.” Father, Son, and Spirit are what they are from eternity past. Pannenberg, Moltmann, Jenson all want to reverse this: Father, Son, and Spirit are what they are in eternity future. God’s eternity is not the persistence in the way he started but His power to achieve al His aims. Does the Cappadocian emphasis on origin arise from a residual tragic metaphysics? Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In