Feature
Image-Bearers for God
Does Biblical Language for Man Matter?
On Ash Wednesday this year I attended my parish church and was marked by the priest with the Sign of the Cross, along with the words: Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return. As powerful as the symbolism of the act is, the words fell flat.
Or is it just me recalling the old wording: Remember, O man, that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return? The priest pausing mid-sentence—O man—and addressing each worshiper as “thou,” rather than gliding past with an indeterminate “you.” Each of these “thou’s” shares a common humanity: all are man, heirs in sin of the one earthly . . .
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Stephen F. Noll (Ph.D., University of Manchester) is Professor Emeritus at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, and retired Vice Chancellor of Uganda Christian University. Many of his essays on Anglican issues have been collected in The Global Anglican Communion: Contending for Anglicanism 1993-2018. He blogs at www.contendinganglican.org.
more on sex from the online archives
27.3—May/June 2014
Facts versus Stereotypes About Love & Marriage in the Land of the Free by Allan C. Carlson
31.6—November/December 2018
on the Church's Response to the Anti-marriage Tide by Diane Woerner
25.4—July/August 2012
The Corrosive & Far-Reaching Fallout of the Sexual Revolution by Anthony Esolen
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more from the online archives
28.1—January/February 2015
on State Impositions & Church Acquiescence by Stephen Baskerville
32.1—January/February 2019
Answers Secular & Religious by Allan C. Carlson
32.2—March/April 2019
Flight from the Absolute: Cynical Observations on the Postmodern West, Volume II by Paul Gosselin by Louis Markos
