The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

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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History: Early church pacifism

Stephenson’s discussion of the “pacifism” of the early church is balanced.  “One cannot overstate,” he begins, “the essential messiness of early Christianity, which was not a monolithic set of beliefs but countless local sets of ideas and practices.  Moreover, we know primarily the views of an elite group of scholars whose writings have been preserved, most frequently because they suited later tastes for reasons of style and theology.  Therefore, to attempt to discern one coherent Christian attitude to warfare in the centuries before Constantine is wrongheaded.”

Of Tertullian, he rightly notes that his “disapproval of Christian participation in military matters is not principally provoked by the potential for violence occasioned by army life.  Rather, his particular distaste is for the requirement for all soldiers in the Roman army to participate fully and regularly, without fail or resistance, in the state religio, according to the dictates of the religious calendar, the feriale.”

After a summary of the evidence, he concludes “no Christian writer in the religion’s first three centuries formulated a fully developed ethical theory of pacifism. . . . But it is clear that most who were later considered orthodox found the notion of killing repugnant, and to heretics like Marcion it was abhorrent.”  He goes on to suggest that “orthodoxy” was much more flexible and diverse in the early centuries, and could only be determined strictly after Constantine, when the decisions of synods and councils were buttressed by state power.

History: The original feminism and the rise of Christianity

In his fine recent biography of Constantine, Paul Stephenson explains the growth of Christianity as a result of “sex, health, and arithmetic.”  The sex part has partly to do with abortion and infanticide, but more deeply with the basic family structure of ancient Rome: “If the population of the Roman Empire was sixty million at the time of Constantine’s birth, only around twenty-four million of these were women.  Given that boys are more problematic in the womb, more sickly and more inclined to die at a young age in military activity or by violence, this figure is quite remarkable and can be explained only by the fact that baby girls were frequently murdered.”

He goes on: “It was rare for all but the wealthiest families to raise more than one daughter, however many were born . . .

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History: Napoleon Makes Europe

Bilington again: The nationalist ideal spread throughout Europe through Napoleon, “the first ruler to base a political regime exclusively upon the nation . . . the most powerful purely national symbol that any nation has had.”  Poles and Italians were inspired by the French example; Spaniards and Prussians cultivated their own nationalist movements in opposition to Napoleon.  Billington comments, “By the end of his career Napoleon’s grande armee had in effect supplanted the revolutionary grande nation.  That army was two-thirds foreign by the time of its decisive defeat in the ‘Battle of the Nations’ in 1813 by a coalition of nationalists he had awakened throughout Europe.”

History: American v. French Revolutions

Billington helpfully focuses on the issue of nationalism to describe the differences between French and American revolutionary movements.  In France, nationalism was an inspiration for revolution from the beginning.  La nation was “a new fraternity in which lesser loyalties as well as petty enmities were swept aside by the exultation of being born again as enfants de la patrie: children of a common fatherland.  The nation was a militant ideal that was largely discovered on the jour de gloire of battle and best expressed in the levee en masse of 1793: the prototype of modern mass conscription on a ‘national’ scale.”

In France, “the concept of a ‘nation’ was central even though no new country was created. . . .

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History: Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite

In his endlessly fascinating classic Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, Librarian of Congress James Billington notes that, though ancient, the triangle of values in the slogan of the French Revolution took on “a new mystical aura” during the 18th and 19th century.

He sums them up this way: Liberty was the political “ideal of security freedom through a constitutional republic.”  Liberty was “defined in terms of constitutional rights and popular legislatures.”  This ideal “may be identified with the Enlightenment reformism of the eighteenth century.”

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History: Russia’s Foundings

Russia has two foundings – first, as an Orthodox Christian civilization in 988 under Prince Vladimir of Kiev; second, as a Westernizing and modernizing nation under Peter the Great in the 17th and 18th centuries.  In his superb Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, Orlando Figes describes the effect of each founding.

Regarding the first:

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History: Russian Whirlwind

In her delightful Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia, Suzanne Massie has a wonderful chapter on Peter the Great.  She gives a vivid portrait of his 1697 visit to the West, the first time in six hundred years a Tsar had left Russia, and the first visit a Tsar ever made to the West: “In March 1697, led by Peter’s Genevan General Lefort, the friend and adviser of his youth, a Grand Embassy of some two hundred and seventy persons set out for Europe.  There were ambassadors with their suites of young nobles wearing long furred coats and hats covered with pearls and jewels, accompanied by trumpeters, drummers, interpreters, merchants and jesters.  There were Cossacks, halberdiers and guardsmen with gleaming weapons, and even a Caucasian prince armed with a jeweled scimitar.  Lefort was dressed as a Tatar khan and attended by ten gentlemen in flowing robes, fifteen servants, an orchestra and four dwarfs.”

Typically, Peter himself went incognito, sort of, dressed as a sailor.  He got to Konigsberg before the rest of the delegation and used the extra few days to earn a master’s certificate in gunnery from a Prussian engineer.  Peter wanted to know everything:

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Bible - OT - Psalms History: Mother Zion

“Glorious things are spoken of you, Zion, city of our God” (Psalm 87:3).  What sorts of glories (nikbadot, from kabad)?  Battles won?  Cultural achievements?  The temple?  In Psalm 87, Zion is glorious because Zion is a fruitful mother.  Like Proverbs 31, Psalm 87 is a heroic celebration of domesticity.

Verse 3 lists some of Zion’s unlikely children: Egypt, Babylon, Philistia, Tyre, Ethiopia.  ”Each one was born in her (v. 5).  Yahweh tallies up the peoples and finds again and again, “This one was born here” (v. 6).  Zion is the city with maternal rule over the kings of the earth.  And the nations know it: The Psalm ends with an international dance and song, each nation acknowledging that Zion is the spring from which it flowed.

What can we make of this Psalm?  Proto-Zionist hyperbole?  In what real sense was Zion the mother of Egypt and Babylon?  How did Zion give birth to and raise these great ancient empires from infancy?  If we were to figure that out, we would have a key to a radically revised account of ancient history.

Economics History: Mauss and Smith

In an essay on Mauss’ The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies in Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory, Mary Douglas makes an intriguing comparison between Mauss and Adam Smith: Mauss “discovered a mechanism by which individual interests combine to make a social system, without engaging in market exchange. This is an enormous development beyond Durkheim’s ideas of solidarity based on collective representations. The gift cycle echoes Adam Smith’s invisible hand: gift complements market in so far as it operates where the latter is absent. Like the market it supplies each individual with personal incentives for collaborating in the pattern of exchanges. Gifts are given in a context of public drama, with nothing secret about them. In being more directly cued to public esteem, the distribution of honour and the sanctions of religion, the gift economy is more visible than market. Just by being visible, the resultant distribution of goods and services is more readily subject to public scrutiny and judgements of fairness than are the results of market exchange. In operating a gift system a people are more aware of what they are doing, as shown by the sacralization of their institutions of giving. Mauss’s fertile idea was to present the gift cycle as a theoretical counterpart to the invisible hand.”

Douglas thinks that this has significant implications for anthropological theory: “When anthropologists search around for a telling distinction between societies based on primitive and modern technologies, they try out various terms such as pre-literate, simple, traditional. Each has limitations that unfit it for general use. But increasingly we are finding that the idea of the gift economy comprises all the associations, symbolic and interpersonal and economic, that we need for comparing with market economy.”

History: Puritan fasts

In their introduction to The Culture of English Puritanism,1560-1700 (Themes in Focus), Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales spend several pages discussing the role of fasting in Puritanism.  The begin with  Patrick Collinson’s remark that “an anthropologist wanting to describe puritan culture . . .  should be led without further delay to teh puritan fast.”  Fasting of course was common, and regularized into a schedule, during the medieval period, and though the Reformers “objected to the routinized nature of these Catholic fasts,” they still “continued to regard fast-days organized for specific purposes as legitimate and valuable.” the  Elizabethan church “made provision for the holding of occasional public fast-days at times of particular crisis.”

But the Puritans “showed the most enthusiasm for public fasting and indulged in the practice most frequently, by supplementing the rare opportunities for government-sponsored fasting with their own unauthorized days. . . .

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American Religion History: Manifest Domesticity

Given the sharp separation of spheres between men and women in 19th-century America, one would not expect women to play much of a role in the expansion of American power.  Empire-building was man’s work, while women tended the heart-fires back home.  In an award-winning 1998 article (pointed out to me by my colleague Chris Schlect), Amy Kaplan showed that the spheres were not divided in this fashion, that imperial symbols and rhetoric were employed in American discussions of domesticity, and that Americans played off the fact that “domesticity” had both a familial and a national connotation (as in “domestic policy”).  Kaplan found it curious that domesticity was valorized at the very time that American embarked on a frantic expansive policy across the American continent.  The two movements seem to be connected.  (If nothing else, Kaplan’s title, “Manifest Domesticity,” deserves an award all by itself.)

Recent work, Kaplan acknowledged, had already deconstructed the two–sphere ideology by showing that “the private feminized that space of the home both infused and bolstered the public male arena of the market, and that the sentimental attached to maternal influence values were used to sanction women’s entry into the wider civic realm from which those same values theoretically excluded them.”  Yet, “this deconstruction structural of separate spheres, however, leaves another opposition intact: the domestic in intimate opposition to the foreign.”  She proposed that we more accurately capture the 19th-century mentality if we place “domestic” in opposition to “foreign” in addition to its opposition to “political” or “public.”

She also proposed that the boundary of foreign and domestic was too static:

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History: Elizabethan Plagiarism

Arthur Golding is usually credited with translating Seneca’s de Beneficiis into English, but in a 1961 article H.H.  Davis described an earlier English translation: “there was an earlier translation by Nicholas Haward of this same moral essay, printed nine years before Golding’s, entitled The Line of Liberalitie Dulie Directinge the Wel Bestowing of Benefites and Reprehending the Comonlie Used Vice of Ingratitude. Anno 1569. Imprinted at London in Fletestrete Neare to S. Dunstones Church by Thomas Marshe. Haward translated – or at least published – the first three books only, as against the full seven of Golding’s version.”

This has not always been recognized as a translation of Seneca because, Davis says, “the earlier translation has no acknowledgment that this is the English of De beneficiis, nor is there any reference to Seneca.”

History: Ancient surgery

In a harrowing article about the reconstruction of a young man’s face after an electrical burn in The New Yorker, the author says in passing: “Reconstructive surgery is an ancient art, dating back at least to the time of the Upanishads, in India. In about 600 B.C., Sushruta, a scholar from Varanasi, catalogued more than three hundred surgical procedures, among them what may be the first documented rhinoplasty, which involved using the leaf of a creeper as a measuring device. ‘A patch of living flesh equal in dimension to the preceding leaf should be sliced off from the region of the cheek and, after scarifying it with a knife, swiftly adhered to the severed nose,’ Sushruta advised. A pedicle—a bridge of skin keeping the patch linked to the cheek—provided blood to the graft while it integrated with the nose, and was later removed. An ear, he noted, could be repaired the same way.”

Sushruta’s treatise made its way into the West in the sixteenth century, and helped birth modern Western medical practice.

 

History: Sponsoring the temple

VanderKam quotes 2 Maccabees 3:1-3′s claim that “King Seleucus of Asia defrayed from his own revenues all the expenses connected with the service of the sacrifices,” and comments: This continues “the centuries-old practice that the foreign overlord of Judea pay at least a part of the expenses involved in the Jerusalem cult.”  He cites Ezra and Josephus’s quotation of an edict of Antiochus III.

The prophetic visions of kings supplying sacrifices and other materials for Israel’s temple worship thus had an historical precedent.  The prophets were envisioning a restoration of the earlier practice of Gentile support and sponsorship for the temple.

History: Friends of Abraham

1 Maccabees famously includes a letter from King Areus of Sparta to Onias, high priest of Israel, in which it is stated that “the Spartans and the Jews . . . are brothers and are of the family of Abraham.”  Scholars dismiss the genealogical connection, and many even deny that the letter is authentic: Would a Spartan king claim ancestry with a barbarian people?  But James C. VanderKam (From Joshua to Caiaphas: High Priests after the Exile) assembles evidence that make a plausible case for the authenticity of the letter.

To start, he cites Moses Hadas’ claim that Greeks took up whatever genealogy that could be advantageous to them: “It was the Greeks themselves who set up the precedent; their ancient genealogies . . . made a place for the founders of various eastern nations, including Egypt and Persia, and in the historical period they were not above inventing genealogies when it suited their political ambitions.”

Besides, there are other ancient documents that make a connection between Greeks and Hebrews.

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History: What it looks like from the other side

William Appleman Williams writes in his Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1962) that “in expanding its own economic system throughout much of the world, America has made it very difficult for other nations to retain any economic independence.  This is particularly true in connection with raw materials.  Saudi Arabia, for example, is not an independent oil producer [this was written before OPEC took off].  Its oil fields are an integrated and controlled part of the American oil industry.  But a very similar, if often less dramatic, kind of relationship also develops in manufacturing industries.  This is the case in countries where established economic systems are outmoded or lethargic, as well as in the new, poor nations that are just beginning to industrialize.  American corporations exercise very extensive authority, and even commanding power, in the political economy of such nations.”

If we scrape off every tonality of complaint here, ignore the factors of greed or skullduggery, and we are still left with a difficult problem.  Suppose a brand new energy source were developed, and it was discovered that Burundi was the place where most of this new energy source was located.  Given the sheer size and reach of American economic activity, it would be virtually impossible for Burundi to develop this source in a way that protects its interests and benefits its people above all.  We are the big cat in the global economy, and however it may look to us it can look pretty threatening from the other side.

American Religion History: Clash of Civilizations

Charles Adams (Those Dirty Rotten taxes: The Tax Revolts that Built America) notes that the clash between North and South was exacerbated by the Confederate decision to lower tariffs and create a free trade zone.  Northern interests recognized that this would ruin their trade and manufacturing, as cheap European goods were redirected to Southern ports.  The North reacted with ferocity, claiming that Southern trade policy was an attack on northern civilization.

This, Adams thinks, accounts for the savagery of the war, which is summarizes in a sobering paragraph: “It has been difficult for many Civil War students to fathom why the northern states would sacrifice so much money and blood to conquer the South and force them to remain in the federal Union.  It seems especially strange for a people who believed in government by consent to want to force on another people a government against their consent.  And force they used, of monstrous proportions that shocked the civilized world.  This was no minor military encounter.  To take away from the southern people their right of self-determination, there had to be a massive destruction of life, of cities, of towns and villages, of farms and private homes – almost a total annihilation of the social order.  Europeans looked upon this aghast, and reasoned that the Americans must have learned this kind of warfare from the native Indians, certainly not from their European roots.  Napoleon was a kindly gentleman compared to Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan.”

History: Confessional Gentility

In his The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present, Jan de Vries notes connections between the “Confessionalizing” movement of the seventeenth century and the rise of “genteel” standards of taste and consumption: “While an awakened desire for God’s grace should not be made one with a new desire for a more refined manner of living, or genteel grace, the practice by which the construction of both types of desire was cultivated interacted with each other.  The inward religious project assumed outward material forms (church architecture, bibles, books, and, in Counter-Reformation Catholicism, objects of veneration for the home) while the outward projection of more elevated or refined daily life depended on the development of a suitable material culture.”

He cites an article by Mark Peterson: “If we understand Puritanism as a culture that replicated itself by cultivating in believers a demand for certain experiences, a demand that could only be satisfied (and then only partially and temporarily) through access to sophisticated cultural products, of which communion silver was one, then we can begin to see how Puritanism created patterns of thought and feeling that flowed as easily into the genteel forms of a culture of consumption as they did into the frugal and disciplined norms of the ‘spirit of capitalism.’”

New luxury items were not status-distinguishing but unifying, and the result was, increasingly, national standards of taste: “By the late seventeenth century the striking feature of Dutch material culture is its uniformity.  The basic form of expressing status and achieving comfort were remarkable similar between city and country, and between rich and poor.  It was the cost and specific quality rather than the types of objects and their general form that differed.”  What happened in the Netherlands happened throughout Europe.  He quoted from John Nef: “With the help of a new artistic craftsmanship, a style of living spread throughout Europe that led all Europeans to want to share, at least to some extent, in that douceur de vivre, accompanied by high standards of virtue in actual living, which a very considerable few were coming to possess for the first time in history.”

American Religion History: Rebs and Indians

Harry Stout’s Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War is a chilling book, but one of the most chilling moments comes at the end, in a quotation of a letter from General Philip Sheridan to Sherman in 1873: “In taking the offensive [against Indians] I have to select that season when I can catch the fiends; and, if a village is attacked and women and children killed, the responsibility is not with the soldiers but with the people whose crimes necessitated the attack.  During the war did any on e hesitate to attack a village or town occupied by the enemy because women or children were within its limits? Did we cease to throw shells into Vicksburg or Atlanta because women and children were there?”

Sherman’s own views were expressed in a response to an earlier massacre: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”

History Politics Theology - Ecclesiology: Unwitting secularizers

Gregory VII won his battle, but lost the war.  Joseph Strayer (On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton Classic Editions)) notes that “by separating itself so clearly from lay governments, the Church unwittingly sharpened concepts about the nature of secular authority.  Definitions and arguments might vary, but the most ardent Gregorian had to admit that the Church could not perform all political functions, that lay rulers were necessary and had a sphere in which they should operate. They might be subject to the guidance and correction of the Church, but they were not part of the administrative structure of the church. . . . In short, the Gregorian concept of the Church almost demanded the invention of the concept of the State.”   And the State was seen as having a particular role, the “guarantor and distributor of justice.”

Gregory’s reformed ended up solidifying a political nature/grace duality, separated the sphere of love from the sphere of justice.

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