Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

History: Euhemerist typology

RPC Hanson notes an “ingenious” application of the euhemerist theory that the pagan gods originated from human beings: The god Separis “who was represented as having a bushel for a headdress, was in reality the patriarch Joseph whom the supertitious Egyptians had deified after his death out of gratitude for his supplying them with corn.”

Theology - Liturgical: Ascension in song

A footnote to From Silence to Song.

In Hezekiah’s rededication ceremony, the Levites play instruments and sing during the ascension offering (2 Chronicles 29:25-30). Their offerings ascend with song; they ascend in song. Alongside the smoke from the animal, they offer up prayers and an offering of praise. Mingled with the smoke of the offering is the sound of singing, musical instruments. The singing and music-making doesn’t start with the purification offering. Song starts with the ascent, and continues into the time of the meal. As Israelites traveled to the temple singing along the way, singing their Psalms of ascent, so they ascended singing through their ascension offerings.

In fact, the way the text is written suggests that song has completely displaced the animal sacrifice. Compare the description of the purification offering in verses 20-24 with the description of the burnt offering in verses 25-28.

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Theology - Liturgical: Eucharistic meditation

1 Corinthians 10:16-17: Is not the cup of blessing which we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ? Is not the loaf which we break a sharing in the body of Christ? Since there is one loaf, we who are many are one body; for we all partake of the one loaf.

What is the church? The church is a body, and like a body it has many different parts and organs and limbs but is yet one. The church is a loaf; as the Didache says, we are like grains gathered from many distant hills to be ground, sifted, baked into a single loaf of bread.

Equally, the church is a song.

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Theology - Liturgical: Exhortation

Words are central to human relationships. We can see only the outside of other people, but words bring out things from within. But relationships are not just words, but an exchange of words, offering our words and getting words back, giving and receiving words. A one-sided conversation is no conversation. A one-sided relationship is no relationship.

But it often seems that we carry on a one-way conversation with God. We pray, and He’s silent. We sing, and He might give us a slight smile, but we can’t know because we can’t see Him. We pour out ourselves before Him, and what secrets does He disclose to us?

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Philosophy: Truth and Error

It was an ancient axiom that truth comes before error.  ”The real thing always exists before the representation of it,” Tertullian wrote, “the copy comes later.”  This means “truth comes first and falsification afterwards.”

The “always” in first statement is self-evidently false; the reality is frequently the opposite.  In some cases, reality precedes representation - map before territory, God before image of God, mountain before my depiction of a mountain. But not “always”: Blueprints before buildings, strategies before battles, outline before essay, sketch in the mind’s eye before the pencil is put to paper.  Ultimately, there’s a basic aporia, for the Son who is the Image of the Father is equiprimordial with the Father.

What’s behind this? I think it’s a failure to appreciate poiesis.

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Film: Persona again

And another thing: Who could believe that you could make a movie that is not just watchable but deeply engaging with basically two people, one of whom says nothing?  What kind of artistic chutzpah does it take to try to wring drama out of a 2-hour monologue?  What kind of genius does it take to succeed?

Film: Persona

Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 Persona is brilliant cinematic philosophy.  Elisabet, an actress, becomes confused during a performance and falls silent.  Her psychiatrist gives this diagnosis: She got tired of playing roles, putting on masks, and knew that every word she spoke involved some sort of performance.  So she stopped speaking.  But the psychiatrist also discerns that her silence is also a performance, and urges her to play it for all its worth and then move on to another role.

Sister Alma, a young nurse, takes care of Elisabet at a seaside cottage.  Sharing days with the utterly silent Elisabet, she finds herself chattering on and on, revealing her most shameful secrets.  Elisabet says nothing.  Alma becomes desperate for something, a single word, a minute of conversation.  She has given herself, and received nothing in return, and begins to go crazy.  (Can a gift be given?)  Only when, during a violent argument, Alma threatens to throw boiling water on her does Elisabet speak.  Fear forces her out from behind the mask.

Several points from this very rich film:

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Theology - Liturgical: Feast of Rededication

Is it fair to use the sequence of offerings in Leviticus 8 and Numbers 6 as models for Christian worship?  After all, these two texts are specialized - the “filling” ceremony for the priests and the rededication of a Nazirite.

When we find the same sequence in Chronicles, it’s also for specialized ceremonies, like the temple rededication in 2 Chronicles 29.

I believe the sequence does work more generally, but to see it we need to discern the logic that connects these ceremonies.

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History: Savage Miracles

Carlin Barton closes a brilliant article comparing concepts of honor, sacrifice, and sacramentum found among martyrs and gladiators with some observations on the wider cultural import of her work.  One of her main aims is to overcome the perception that Christians and Romans were working in completely separate symbolic universes, a perception that fundamentally shapes the historical work of Gibbon and Nietzsche’s genealogy:

“For Edward Gibbon, like Friedrich Nietzsche, the Romans were the strong and the noble.  Both saw a sanguine, virile, joyfully predatory Rome attacked and infested by a mode of being foreign and alien to the Roman spirit that subverted the valuation of the proud and noble with the positive valuation of the humble and base. . . .

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Theology - Eschatology: Hebrew and Hellenist

Yoder argues that from the time of the Babylonian captivity, the Jews developed a proto-”free church” model of community life.  True in some respects.  Jews didn’t have their own polity.  But I’ve got doubts if that’s a fair characterization of Jews in and after the exile.

Why? The Bible for starters.  Jews in exile are not isolated in their ghettos.  They are seeking the peace of the city; Daniel, Nehemiah, Mordecai, Esther are the heroes of the time, and all fully integrated in imperial culture, whether Babylonian or Persian.  They weren’t Amish.

Then there’s archeology.  Jewish synagogues are everywhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, and they aren’t huddled off in some corner of the city.  Some of them are right on the main drag.

If that’s right, it didn’t stay that way.  Jews did retreat into more isolated communities over time.  Which raises the question: What happened?  Christian hostility to Jews is a big part of that story.  But there’s perhaps something more fundamental: AD 70.

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Politics: Maximilian the martyr

Maximilian of Tebessa is often cited as an example of early Christian pacifism.  When Roman officials pressured him to accept a military seal and swear the sacramentum by reminding him that other Christians served without qualms, he still refued, saying “They know what is expedient for them; but I am a Christian, and I cannot do evil.”

What, exactly, is the evil that he would have to do?  Killing?  Swearing?  Idolatry?  It’s not easy to tell.

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History: Orientalizing revolution

Warwick Ball’s Rome in the East is a treasure trove.  Instead of telling the story of Rome from an occidental standpoint, he goes east and looks back.  What does Roman history look like from Arabia, Syria, Edessa, India?  One of his remarkable conclusions is that before the triumph of the west the west had itself been conquered by the east.

Commenting on Constantine’s found of Constantinople, he observes:

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History: Monastic conformism

In reaction to the lax respectability of the majority church, many hardy souls retreated to the desert or the frontier.  So the story goes.

Only the monastery was another form of cultural conformity.  RA Markus (The End of Ancient Christianity) says that “the ideal of the philosophical life was among the most important of the sources which nourished Christian monasticism. . . . In contrast to Judaism, where asceticism played only a minor role and one confined to the fringes of orthodox circles, the whole Hellenistic and Roman philosophical tradition offered a rich store-house of commonplaces extolling the ascetic life.”  Christian monks “were not the first to combine the notions of self-denial and of the life of contemplation; even communal dedication to these ideals had been anticipated in Antiquity.”  Athanasius was on the right track in describing Antony’s as a “philosophic” life.

History: Linguistic Girardianism

Florence Dupont points out in her Daily Life in Ancient Rome that in Latin enemy (hostis) andguest (hospes) “were formed from the same root, which had the meaning ‘the other who is similar to you.’”

History: Carthaginian Tophet

In her study of Roman gladiatorial combat and arenas (Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power) Alison Futrell describes the Phoenician practice of human sacrifice transplanted to Carthage: “The young victim was placed in the arms of the bronze image of Ba’al Hammon, arms that sloped downward toward a pit or large brazier filled with burning embers.  Once the child had been cremated, the ashes were removed and placed in an urn, which in turn was placed in a pit, sometimes lined with cobbles, and then covered over.  A burial marker, a cippus or stela, was often placed above the urn.”

Carthage belies the theory that cultures outgrow this barbarism as they become more educated and sophisticated: “At Carthage . . . expansion of political hegemony, cultural sophistication, and child sacrifice simultaneously peaked, in the fourth and third centuries B.C.”  When Syracuse invaded in the early fourth century, “the nobles of Carthage sacrificed some two hundred of their children.”

Uncategorized: Apsethus the god

Hippolytus tells the story that Apsethus of Libya trained parrots to fly over North Africa crying out “Apsethus is a god,” and Libyans were taken in and began to offer sacrifices to him.

Then a “clever Greek” caught one of the parrots, and retrained it to cry out: “Apsethus, having caged us, compelled us to say Apsethus is a god.”  Betrayed, the Libyans burned Apsethus at the stake.

All you can say is, that’s some parrot.

Uncategorized: Failure of the Church

In his encyclopedic Later Roman Empire, A. H. M. Jones explains that the church after Constantine failed to transform ordinary social behavior and culture not because it was too lax but because it was too rigorist.  Ordinary Christians felt they couldn’t live up to the standards, and responded by delaying baptism to their deathbed or retreating into monasteries.

Little direction was given to Christians in civil service: “Pagan philosophers down to the end of the fourth century produced countless works on the virtues and duties of kings.  Christian writers have nothing to say on this topic, and but little on the duties of the citizen.  For the most part they are content to repeat a few texts inculcating obedience to the authorities and payment of one’s taxes.”  Into the fifth century, the church was doubtful about “very elementary points” of public ethics: “Good Christians . . . were made to feel that they were, if not sinners, falling short of the highest ideals, if they entered public service.”

Hermeneutics: Moses and Christ

Michael Hollerich, who has done some superb revisionist work on Eusebius of Caesarea, explains in a 1990 article from Church History that Eusebius employed a “similar situation” form of typology that focuses on similarities rather than differences between type and antitype, and draws out the similarities in great detail.  He summarizes Eusebius’ discussion of the parallels of Moses and Christ:

“The parallelism is quite close, except that Jesus worked on a worldwide scale by spreading the gospel of monotheism and the godly polity to the gentiles.  Jesus and Moses, Eusebius continues, agreed substantially in their teaching on the origin of the world, the immortality of the soul, and ‘other doctrines of philosophy.’  Furthermore, they both authenticated their proclamations with miraculous works. Moses liberated the people from slavery in Egypt; Jesus Christ summoned the whole human race to freedom from their ‘Egyptian’ bondage to idolatry. . . .”

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Politics: Truth and Freedom

Milbank, discussing the possibility of educative coercion: “although Christianity . . . certainly requires in the end free consent to the truth, it does not fetishize this freedom merely as a correct mode of approach: truth is what most matters, and moreover a collective commitment to truth, since truth itself is the shareable and the harmonious.  Thus in certain circumstances, the young, the deluded, those relatively lacking in vision require to be coerced as gently as possible.  Anyone professing to be shocked by this is, I submit, naively unreflective about what in reality he already accepts (for example in the secular schooling of the young) and is thinking in over-individualistic and over-voluntaristic terms that are ontologically impossible.”

Art: What Rough Beast?

Milbank notes that “science and art have always first mimed the horrors to come.”  Darwinian evolution and avant-garde prepared the way, for foreshadowed, twentieth-century horrors.  He asks, “what may the far more shocking interventions of 1990s art and science . . . betoken for the present century?’

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