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Post-Modern Object-Relations Theory

One critique that I would have of Harry Guntrip's theory of ego, as well as with all object-relations theory, is that it places too much emphasis on the very early mother-child relationship. Certainly, as any parent will attest, a child's personality is in development from the very start. Object-Relations effectively holds the view that if something goes wrong here, you are doomed to a life of ego-failure, but if everything goes well, you develop an iron-clad ego, able to withstand any problem that comes your way. There are several problems with this, not the least of which there are several important personality elements (*cough*sexdrive*cough*) which develop later through biochemical means. Ego development may be hampered early on, but it may also be hampered or disrupted by later environmental effects. Even with the best mother-child relationship, because of the nature of our individual existence, there is no such thing as an un-failable ego. I imagine that child sol...
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The Tragedy of Beauty

There was a movie that came out a few years ago called "The Last Samurai" about Tom Cruise being brought into the last remaining samurai clan in Japan.  Many critics saw it as just a rip-off of "Dances with Wolves", which it was, but there was also there was this underlying theme of the Japanese concept of beauty, mono no aware .  Ken Watanabe, the head of the clan, explained this concept to Tom Cruise while describing the blossoms of a cherry tree.  They are beautiful because they only bloom once a year for a short while and then die.  If you tried to artificially maintain them you would take away what makes them beautiful, their life and their ephemerality. In the movie, the cherry tree was a metaphor for the beautiful and simple family clan that was dying away in the face of modernity.  But this metaphor underlies a more general concept of beauty.  The tragedy of beauty is not that it will one day fade away, but that this transcience and fragility is part of the ...
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The Kingdom of God

One of the primary difficulties with trying to establish the "New Testament vision" or the "Scriptural vision" of the kingdom of God (or a variety of other topics) is the authors of the bible were not modern academics. Now I know that is quite obvious, but we must realize the implications of that, particularly with regards to our practice of "clearly defining our terms". Near-mathematical clarity is a primary virtue, especially in the field of systematic theology. But the NT writers were not systematicians, and so we cannot discount the possibility that at one point in the NT the phrase "kingdom of God" means one thing, and at another point it means something rather different. But would this imply that the NT writers are wrong at some places, that there actually is a single description of the kingdom of God and that they muddle it at some points? And here we find ourselves back in a systematic mode of thinking. It is not a question of the er...
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