Cross and Atonement – A Theological
Perspective
Written in December 2017
Forthcoming in March issue of REVIVE Magazine
“Atonement”, in
biblical terms, means bringing God and man at-one-ment. Sin is an infinitely
unscalable wall that separates man from God. But, on the cross of Christ, this
wall is broken and man is brought into an acceptable relationship with God.
In the Bible, terms
such as “propitiation” (appeasement of God), “expiation” (removal of sins),
“redemption” (buying out with a price), “substitution” (taking the sinner’s place),
“reconciliation”...
Culture as Grammar
Structural anthropologists have been investigating the grammar of culture for the past few decades. Prominent among these is the name of Claude Levi-Strauss whose work on the universal grammar of culture is well known. (Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, Sherry B. Ortner, Culture/power/history: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton University Press, 1993) p.380)
Some philosophers have recently been trying to interpret culture as grammar. For instance, Chengyang Li in Philosophy East and West proposed an interpretation of Li in Confucius’...
Faith and the Epistemic Quest
The sources of knowledge have been traditionally limited to at least four: sense-perception, inference, memory, and testimony. Epistemological approaches involve the inductive (empirical), the inferential (rational), the intuitive (mystical), the indefinitive (skeptical), the informative (revelatory), the interpretive (hermeneutical), and the integrative (synthetical).Note Two dispositions that either aid or hamper the quest of knowledge are faith and doubt.
Two opposite views in this regard are:
Integrationalism: The view that faith and the...
