The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

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

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Bible: Beginning With Moses

Those interested in Biblical Theology and related subjects will find a wealth of thoughtful and thought-provoking material here: http://beginningwithmoses.org/

Bible: Bible Matrix

Bible: Arguments from Prophecy

Faustus complained that arguments from prophecy led only to vicious circles.  ”Believe in Jesus because of the prophets, he imagines a Christian telling a pagan.  ”I don’t believe the Hebrew prophets,” the pagan replies.  ”But Jesus endorses the Hebrew prophets,” the Christian rejoins.  Laughing, the pagan turns away.

Augustine disagreed.  Prophecies were persuasive because one could see the fulfillment.  We might expect Augustine to launch into a detailed analysis of how the prophecies of the Old Testament were fulfilled in the gospel accounts, but he goes elsewhere.  Psalm 2 prophesies that the son of David would rule the kings of the earth, and now “the name of Christ has spread through all the nations far and wide” and “the kings of the earth have themselves now become subject to the rule of Christ for their salvation and that all the nations are serving him,” just as the Psalm “predicted long before.”  Augustine would show the pagan Psalm 72, and, citing passages from Jeremiah, would point to the fact that idols are everywhere overthrown.  If the pagan were troubled by the unbelief of Jews, or the fact that the church is troubled by heresies, Augustine would point to prophecies that predicted precisely that.

In sum:

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Bible: Canonization and charism

Weber argued that “Most, though not all, canonical sacred collections became officially established against secular or religiously offensive augmentations as a consequence of a struggle between various competing groups and prophecies for the control of the community.”  Christianity fixed its canon, he argued, “because of the threat to the piety of the petty-citizen masses from the intellectual salvation doctrine of the Gnosticism.”

Weber’s view of canonization rests on his more basic contrast of charisma and consolidation, which relies (as Milbank has shown) on a Kantian deployment of the liberal Protestant metanarrative.  And behind this was the anti-clericalism, anti-priestly animus that Kant took on wholesale from English Deists and latitudinarians.

Weber’s assumption becomes clear in this observation: “The closing of the canon was generally accounted for by the theory that only a certain epoch in the past history of the religion had been blessed with prophetic charisma. According to the theory of the rabbis this was the period from Moses to Alexander, while from the Roman Catholic point of view the period was the Apostolic Age. On the whole, these theories correctly express consciousness of the contrasted direction between prophetic and priestly systematization. Prophets systematized the relationship of human to the world from the viewpoint of ultimate and integrated value position. On the other hand, priests systematized the content of prophecy or of the sacred traditions from the viewpoint of rational casuistry and worldly adaptation according to the mode of thinking and custom of their own stratum and of the laity whom they controlled.”

Bible: Milbank’s Bible

In a discussion of the divergence of “romantic” and “classical” modes of contemporary theology, Milbank highlights the central role of the Scripture.  More fundamental than reason, or the “rational consideration of the propositions of faith” is “meditation on the liturgy, the eucharist and the scriptures.”  Meditating on the liturgy, we meditate on “all the words which wise men have ever uttered,” but especially on “the words of the Bible which contain the most sublime reasonings of all because they anticipate, echo, enforce and again anticipate the epiphanic descent of reason itself to humanity” in the incarnation of the Logos.

We can read the book of the world and the book of Scripture because “our intellectual is illumined (and so able to think at all) through its participation int he very mind of this same author.  The book of creation itself points obscurely to the paradoxically world-exceeding book of scripture.  At the same time the latter refers in the first place always to things of this world and so must be read through the world-book, just as the scriptures also refer to many languages and cultures and thereby assume and anticipate the whole of human history.”  Christian use of language and study of the natural world are “focussed on the Bible that it itself authorized by its critical place in enabling liturgy, the truth worship of the triune God.”

Bible: Totus Christus

Mike Bull is an graphic designer in the wonderfully named Katoomba, New South Wales, who writes about the Bible. He’s produced a massive “biblical theology of the whole Christ” entitled Totus Christus.  There are a lot of juicy details here, but the overall scheme is to follow the heptamerous chiastic pattern of Creation, Division, Ascension, Testing, Maturity, Conquest, Glorification from Genesis to the end of the Bible.  Some of it feels forced and schematic, but overall it’s a lively introduction to a richer reading of Scripture.  With a lot of quotations from James Jordan and me, it’s a good summary of what we’ve been up to for the past couple of decades.

You can get a taste of Mike’s graphic design work, and his biblical research, from his web site: http://www.bullartistry.com.au, which will take you to his blog that has a sample chapter of the book.

Bible: Establishing the law

Tertullian (Against Marcion, 4.16) offers an interesting explanation of the consistency of Jesus’ teaching with that of the lex talionis:

“He who counselled that an injury should be forgotten, was still more likely to counsel the patient endurance of it. But then, when He said. ‘Vengeance is ming, and I will repay,’ He thereby teaches that patience calmly waits for the infliction of vengeance. Therefore, inasmuch as it is incredible that the same (God) should seem to require ’a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye,’ in return for an injury, who forbids not only all reprisals, but even a revengeful thought or recollection of an injury, in so far does it become plain to us in what sense He required ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth - not, indeed, for the purpose of permitting the repetition of the injury by retaliating it, which it virtually prohibited when it forbade vengeance; but for the purpose of restraining the injury in the first instance. . . .

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Bible: Growing house

New Testament metaphors of the church-as-temple are often confusing because they envision a growing building, a building that acts a lot like an organic body: “growing into a holy temple in the Lord” (Ephesians 2:21); “living stones” (1 Peter 2:5).

The conflation of organic and architectural imagery has an Old Testament root.  The house of Yahweh grew from the time of Moses on.  Under Moses, the “house” was simply the tabernacle; with Solomon, the “house of Yahweh” encompassed both the temple and Solomon’s palace complex (cmp. 1 Kings 6:1 and 7:51); in the time of Ezra  and Nehemiah, the “house” Cyrus authorized included the city walls.  Thus, over the course of Israel’s history, the “house” grew up from a tent into a city.  

So has, and will, the church.

Bible: Demythologizing

Bultmann notoriously claimed that no one who switches on an electric light or uses the cutting edge technology of the “wireless” can believe in a world of demons and angels.  That’s not much of an argument, but insofar as it is one, it seems to be: Electric lights show that humans can control the world; if angels and demons exist, human beings are impotent pawns of invisible powers; the electric light therefore disproves the mythological world of the NT.

But what if ancient peoples really were powerless before invisible powers?  What if ancient peoples really couldn’t control the universe?  What if, prior to Jesus, everyone really was under guardians and managers, elementary principles and angelic rulers?  What if God kept us safely under tutors while we were children, waiting for the time when he would give us our inheritance?  What if the Father sent the Son to make us sons, to restore us to Adamic dominion?

In short: What if God, not Bultmann, is the One who “demythologized” the world?

Bible: The City

Some reflections in spired by a paper on the biblical theology of the city by a student, Lisa Beyeler.

1) Genesis 1-11 is often treated as a “prologue” to Israel’s history, but that tends to detach it as “natural history” as opposed to “redemptive history.” It is a preparation for the history of Israel, but not because it is detached from Israel’s history.  Rather, Genesis 1-11 sets up the problems that Israel is designed to solve. Abram is called right after the collapse of the Babel project, and Hebrews 11:10 says that he looks for a “better city, whose builder and maker is God.” Abram never built a city, of course, but he’s an urban visionary. 

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Bible: Scapegoat

Priests used lots to select a scapegoat on the day of atonement (Leviticus 16:8-10).

Joshua used lots to locate Achan the troubler of Israel; Achan was a scapegoat, whose death cleansed the people so they could defeat Ai.

Haman threw lots, trying to pinpoint the time for offering the scapegoat Jews.

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Bible: Mission and culture

The First Things web site today posted some of my biblical-theological reflections on missions and culture: http://www.firstthings.com.

Bible: Synoptic problem

Scripture gives us two “synoptic problems” – the problem of harmonizing the gospels and the problem of harmonizing Kings and Chronicles.  That is, the history of the kingdom and the history of Jesus are each told more than once.

The parallel is intriguing.  It suggests that the two histories are parallel in other ways as well.  At the very least, it suggests that both are centrally about the fortunes of the Davidic dynasty.

Bible: Intoxicating reading

Augustine on John 2: “Read all the prophetic books without perceiving Christ: what will you find so insipid and so silly?  Understand Christ there, and what you are reading not only becomes savory but intoxicates.”

Hamann quotes this in his Aesthetica in nuce: Intelliges ibi CHRISTUM, non solum sapit, quod legis, sed etiam inebriat.

Bible: Biblical Studies and Classics

What is needed in biblical studies is something analogous to the classicism of French scholars like Vernant, Detienne, Vidal-Naquet, and their followers.  They were carefully attentive to the literary riches of classical texts, but were at the same time anthropologists and cultural historians.

I see a few moves in this direction in biblical studies, but not nearly enough.  Girard does something like this, but is too eccentric; his theory masters every text he looks at.  Perhaps biblical studies just doesn’t attract minds like those of Vernant and Detienne.

Bible: Sabbath

Eugene Peterson writes that the Sabbath “erects a weekly bastion against the commodification of time, against reducing time to money, reducing time to what we can get out of it, against leaving no time for God or beauty or anything that cannot be used or purchased.  It is a defense against the hurry that desecrates time.”

Bible: Blogging Toward Sunday

Another lectionary meditation at The Christian Century: http://www.theolog.org/blog/2008/06/blogging-towa-4.html

Bible: Israel and the nations

Knight has a lot of intriguing things to say about Israel and the nations, among them: “As Israel suffers the gentile onslaughts, Israel is half-persuaded that it has to compete with the Gentiles as an equal rather than as their lord; Israel has to fight them as thought it were one of them, rather than bear them as a parent does a child.  Inasmuch as Israel succumbs to this temptation, Israel sins – Israel gentiles.”

Bible: Blogging Toward Sunday

Another lectionary meditation at the Christian Century: http://www.theolog.org/blog/2008/06/blogging-towa-3.html.

Bible: Blogging Toward Sunday

Another of my lectionary meditations is up at the Christian Century web site.  You can find it at: http://www.theolog.org/blog/2008/06/blogging-towa-2.html#more.

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