Alan Jacobs posted a summary of Plutarch’s 2nd century essay on the cessation of the oracles.
It was widely recognized in Plutarch’s time (late first and early second century A.D.) that the great oracles of the ancient world — the most famous of them being the one at Delphi, of course — had largely ceased to provide useful guidance or had fallen silent altogether. Some of the once famous shrines had been abandoned and had fallen into ruin. But no one understood why this had happened. Plutarch’s “essay” is a fictional dialogue — narrated by one Lamprias, who also takes the leading role in the conversation and may well be Plutarch’s mouthpiece — in which a group of philosophically-inclined men debate the possible reasons for the oracles’ failure.
Jacobs goes on the describe the various reasons that Plutarch through Lamprias rejects and accepts for this silence, which he concludes is a result of shifting natural phenomena. I happened to read Jacobs’ post at the same time I was reading Athanasius’ On the Incarnation of the Word. Writing in the 4th century, Athanasius addresses this subject as well, but from a much different perspective. Athanasius argues that the incarnation of Christ profoundly altered the world. His incarnation brought the divine into the created, and broke the power of spiritual blindness upon the world. Jesus as the conquering word is not only defeating spiritual evil in the present and future, but has defeated it already by his arrival…
One week ago (January 23rd, 2019) the government of the state of New York enacted a bill legalizing abortion all the way up to delivery and legalized leaving infants to die who survive a botched abortion. The One World Trade Center was lit up in pink to celebrate this legislation, with the morbid irony that it has a monument to all the unborn children killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Yesterday a Democratic delegate to the Virginia State Assembly defended bill she submitted to the assembly that would allow abortion up until the moment of delivery, even if the baby is full-term and the mother is dilated…
This is a list of my top (i.e. favorite) posts from the past year. This list is most helpful for me to look back later to see what captured my attention during 2018.
- Why don’t we pray for arms to regrow? This posts addresses this question and discusses the nature of prayer and God’s will.
- I wrote several posts on the question of exceptions and scruples. This is a subject I intend to address again, but my focus over the past year was on the freedom of pastors to teach on a subject where they disagree with their confession of faith. My conclusions were that if a pastor is granted an exception, he is free to teach it and the presbytery cannot prohibit that teaching. However, a pastor being granted an exception does necessarily free him in his practice, and does not grant that exception to the congregation by proxy.
- I wrote an extensive analysis of the confessionalism of the Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians (ECO). ECO and the EPC are closely related, and my hope in that analysis was to provide a charitable and robust critique of ECO’s confessional approach in order to better foster a deeper partnership between our churches.
- I wrote two very different posts on sexual ethics. The first is on children in the worship of the church when the scriptural subject is sex. The second was a biblical argument for adultery disqualifying elders from serving as elders again.
A list of my top posts from 2017 can be found here.
