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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Uncategorized: Modes of production

A reader pointed me to a fascinating article by David Graeber in a 2006 issue of Critique of Anthropology(available on the web).  He examines the “naturalization” of capitalism that has developed even within Marxist theory, partly under the pressure from world-system analysis.    Capitalism is seen by many not as a contingent organization of production and distribution but as the secret reality of economic life from time immemorial.  Graeber notes, “Wallerstein argued that almost all our familiar categories of analysis – class, state, household and so on – are really only meaningful within the existing capitalist world-system, then presumably entirely new terms would have to be invented to look at other ones. If so, then what did different world systems have in common? What was the basis for comparison?”

From this it was a “short hop to arguing that we are not dealing with terms of comparison at all, but different functions that one would expect to find in any complex social order. This was the move taken by the ‘Continuationists’ . . . who argue that, just as any complex society will still have families (‘kinship’), they will also tend to have some sort of government, which means taxes (‘tribute’) and some sort of market system (‘capitalism’). Having done this, it’s easy enough to argue that the very project of comparison is pointless. In fact, there is only one world system.”

Graeber wants to rehabilitate and transform previous notions of “modes of production” and, necessarily, typical notions of “materialism.”

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Uncategorized: What is a letter?

Michael Root summarizes the notion of “configurational” understanding, as opposed to a “theoretical” understanding of things, that has been developed by Louis O. Mink: In narratives, events are “elements in a single and concrete complex of relationships. Thus a letter which I burn may be understood not only as an oxidizable substance but as a link with an old friend. It may have relieved a misunderstanding, raised a question, or changed my plans at a crucial moment. As a letter, it belongs to a kind of story, a narrative of events which would be unintelligible without reference to it. But to explain this I would not construct a theory of letters or of friendships but would, rather, show how it belongs to a particular configuration of events like a part in a jigsaw puzzle.”

What a thing is cannot be reduced to either material features or metaphysical essence.  It is what it is by its place in a narrative.

Uncategorized: Making allowances

The State Department boasts that “The United States actively promotes freedom of religion as a fundamental human right and as a source of stability throughout the world.”

Fundamental, unless it’s unconvenient for other reasons.  Then, well, it’s not so fundamental after all.

Hilary Clinton designated 8 countries as “Countries of Particular Concern”: Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korean, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Uzbekistan.  Six came under sanctions.  The easy pickings.  Guess which two got a pass?  Perhaps the ones we need for our Middle East wars?  (Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan.)

Notable by absence from this list are: Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan.  Wonder why they’re not there.

Uncategorized: Catholic anthropology

In his 2002 Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism, and Social Thought in France, Ivan Strenski examined the setting for French Enlightenment conceptions of sacrifice.  He argued “that a lart portion of the Catholic assumptions about the nature of sacrifice were in their turn equally well assumed by a host of French thinkers, ranging all the way from Durkheim, Hubert and Mauss to Alfred Loisy, or later to the likes of Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, as well as Rene Girard, Paul Claudel, Marguerite Yourcenar.  Even in de-Christianizing, the French Revolution and its epigones traded on the Catholic discourse of sacrifice.  Indeed, this discourse seemed durable enough to make it possible to speak of ‘sacrifice’ as having its own history.”

And, as Strenski emphasizes, largely a Catholic history.

Uncategorized: Blood of the bride

In the same lecture, Meyers notes that the apostles at the beginning of Acts charge the Jewish leaders specifically with putting Jesus on the cross.  That charge disappears from Acts after the church disperses from Jerusalem. 

When Paul returns to Jerusalem, his indictment of the Jews is different.  He doesn’t accuse them of killing Jesus, but of shedding the blood of Stephen (Acts 22:20). 

Luke shows us that before the final turning to the Gentiles, the servants of Jesus must shed their blood in union with Jesus and Paul must bring the indictment to Jerusalem for shedding the blood of the Bride.

Uncategorized: Sacramental realism

“Insofar as Protestantism denies transubstantiation,” writes Douglas Farrow in Ascension Theology, it collapses into idealism and subjectivism, turns eschatology into utopianism, reduces ecclesiology to secular politics.  Without transubstantiation, Protestants appear before God empty-handed, or make the eucharistic offering “something of our own, something offered alongside of Christ rather than in, with, and through Christ.  ’Unholy fire’ upon the altar of God.”

A weighty charge, and one with a good deal of truth, but qualified: By transubstantiation, Farrow doesn’t mean “the terms or the particulars of medieval metaphysics” but instead “the eucharistic realism of John 6.”  That qualification evacuates the charge, because of course much classic Protestantism has never denied eucharistic realism.  What was Marburg about, after all?  What Farrow is attacking is Zwinglianism, or the insipid shadow of Calvin that one finds in too many Reformed churches.

And the notion that Protestantism treats the eucharistic offering as something “alongside” rather than “in” Christ is extraordinary.  Calvin, to be sure, didn’t think the elements constituted an offering, nor did Luther.  But Calvin did speak of the eucharistic offering of praise and self-gift, and the notion that this self-gift is “something of our own” clashes with everything Calvin ever wrote.  We have nothing of our own – that’s the whole point of the Protestant protest.

Uncategorized: Regent College Theology Conference, September 2011

Click here for more information on the conference. Click image to view full size.

Uncategorized: Sacrifice of Israel

My colleague Toby Sumpter points out that the series of judgments in Isaiah 9:8-21 is following a sacrificial sequence.

First, Yahweh threatens to break down the brick altars and sycamore shrines of Israel.  They rebuild them, so He cuts them in pieces, like a sacrificial animal.  They keep sinning, and so He lights a sacrificial fire that will burn them.  The sacrifice ends with a macabre sacrificial meal, “each of them eats the flesh of his own arm” (v. 20).

Uncategorized: Eucharistic meditation

Exodus 13:7-9:  And it shall be, when the LORD brings you into the land of the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Amorites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, which He swore to your fathers to give you, a land flowing with milk and honey, that you shall keep this service in this month. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, and on the seventh day there shall be a feast to the LORD.

All through Exodus, Yahweh reminds Israel of the promise He initially made to Abram, the promise to give His people the land of the Canaanites.  At the burning bush, Yahweh tells Moses that He is going to bring Israel from Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey.  He promises to send His angel before Israel, and then promises to go before Israel Himself.

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Theology - Christology Theology - Soteriology Uncategorized: Grace and Christology

In his Grace and Christology in the Early Church (Oxford Early Christian Studies), Douglas Fairbairn argues that the Christololgical debates of the fifth century were also debates about the nature of grace.  Is grace only an assisting power that enables us to cooperate with God (Nestorian) or is grace God’s self-gift, the indwelling of the Spirit, incorporation into Christ, and engrafting into the perichoretic communion of the Trinity (Cyrillian)?  Different conceptions of salvation were implied.  As Fairbairn puts it, the question was “whether grace consisted of Christ giving the Christian power, aid, and assistance in reaching the perfect human condition or whether God gave the believer participation in his own immortality and incorruption.”

Nestorianism thus underwrote a synergistic soteriology; since the divine and human were kept at some distance, and the human nature acted somewhat autonomously from the divine, salvation was achieved through the work of the graced man Jesus, and the cooperative redemption achieved by Jesus + God became a model for human cooperation with grace.  Fairbairn again: For Nestorians, “God the Logos gives that man the power and cooperation he needs to be our pioneer in the march to the perfect age.”  Cyril, by contrast, understood grace as “God’s giving himself to humanity.”  That self-gift to man begins from the first instant of Adam’s existence, when the Creator breathed the Spirit into his nostrils, but this initial contact with the Spirit was to reach fulfillment in the indwelling of the Spirit of Christ.  ”Salvation is receiving God and not simply something from God.”

Bible - OT - Genesis Uncategorized: Joseph’s robe

A number of my students did papers on the robe motif in the Joseph narrative and came up with some fresh (to me) thoughts.  Here are a few of them.

1. At the beginning of the Joseph narrative, Jacob the faterh bestows a robe on his favored son, Joseph.  At the end of the narrative, Joseph, now elevated to the position next to Pharaoh, bestows robes on his estranged and reconciled brothers.  Benjamin particularly is singled out, receiving five changes of clothing from Joseph.  In addition to the neat literary symmetry here, there’s also a Trinitarian hint: The Father elevates His Son among His brothers, so that the Son can later elevate His brothers; the Father gives the glory of His Spirit to the Son so that the Son, dead and exalted, can clothe His brothers in the same Spirit.

2. When Reuben finds that Joseph is no longer in the pit, he tears his garments; Jacob does the same when he thinks Joseph is dead.  None of the other brothers express grief at Joseph’s “death.”  Later, when Benjamin is caught with Joseph’s cup in his sack, they all tear their clothes (44:13).  Not only Judah, but all the brothers have changed, their consciences softened.

3. When Jacob blesses Judah, he says that he “washes his garments in wine, and his robes in the blood of grapes” (49:11).  That connects back to Joseph’s original robe, dipped in the blood of a goat to serve as evidence of Joseph’s death.  Judah too will be betrayed by brothers.  But the image is mainly positive.  Wine is kingly, and a robe washed in wine is royal.  Several students point out that a robe washed in wine doesn’t come out white (cf. Revelation 7:14) but purple, a royal color.  By washing garments in blood-wine, Judah becomes a royal tribe.

Uncategorized: Bloody hands

Isaiah 1:15 is organized as a neat chiasm.  At the center is Yahweh’s rejection of Judah’s prayers, but at the ends are references to hands:

A. in your spreading your hands

B. I will hide my eyes

C. when you multiply prayers

B’. I will not hear

A’. hands covered with blood

The A sections spread out like two hands, hands that, in the last phrase, we discover are covered with blood.

Uncategorized: Corporations and the Corpus Christi

In an interview on Ken Myers’ Mars Hill audio magazine, Lew Daly comments on the failure of American law to recognize the reality of groups.  Corporations are recognized as legal persons endowed with rights, but other groups are not.  This gives corporations enormous legal clout in contest with individuals, even if those individuals band together; and it is evidence that American public life is rooted in individualistic assumptions.

Daly cites Harold Berman’s discussion of corporation law in the medieval period, where Berman notes that, in contrast to Roman law, a corporation in Christendom was not dependent on a grant from the state.  Rather, “any group of persons with the requisite structure and purpose . . . constituted a corporation.”  As corporations, the church and its associations were capable of receiving gifts, were recognized to have property rights and the right to contract, and the capacity to act through representatives.

With this shift in the legal meaning of “corporation,” it’s not surprising that the corporation now holds something close to the cultural and political weight that the church once had.

Uncategorized: Anti-Catholicism and the Wall

In a lengthy review of the career of Justice Hugo Black, Philip Hamburger (Separation of Church and State) lays out his clan connections and the anti-Catholic animus that motivated his views on politics and law.  One supported boasted that Black had visited “Klaverns” all over Alabama during his Senate campaign speaking on Catholicism: “Hugo could make the best anti-Catholic speech you ever heard.”

It’s not an accident that one of Black’s most famous Supreme Court opinions (Everson v. Board of Education) insisted that “The first Amendment has erected a wall between church and state.  That wall must be kept high and impregnable.”  According to Hamburger, the decision was part politics and part anti-Catholicism: By denying that busing children to parochial schools was a breach of the wall, Black threw a sop to Catholic critics; by establishing the “wall” principle, he attempted to prevent the government from giving aid to Catholic schools.

Uncategorized: Charismatic Economics

In an essay in Engaging Economics: New Testament Scenarios and Early Christian Reception, Aaron J. Kuecker contrasts the economics of the Spirit in Luke-Acts with the health and wealth gospel on offer in some “Spirit-filled” churches.  Instead of guaranteeing an increase of net worth, the coming of the Spirit opens believers outward in generous use of their gifts and goods.  Economics is Spirit or Satanic, a point that Kuecker emphasizes by contrasting Ananias and Sapphira, who falsify the Spirit by their greed, with Barabbas.

In sum, “Possession of/by the Holy Spirit explicitly turns people away from the self and outward toward the broader community and the ‘other.’  The outcome of this allocentric identity is that people, and not possessions, become valued as one’s ‘own’. . . . Spirit-influence thus leads to the use of possessions freely for the ‘other,’ as is exemplified by Barabbas.  In clear contrast, the influence of Satan turns people away from the broader community and the ‘other’ and inward toward the self.  The outcome of this egocentric identity is that possessions, and not people, become valued as one’s ‘own.’ . . . Satan prompts a treacherous turn away from the community and leads to destruction. . . . The Spirit prompts a turn toward the community and leads to restored relationships and times of refreshing.’”

Uncategorized: Liberal church?

In the same 1972 article mentioned earlier, Nelson argues that the early medieval church’s “tolerance” was largely a matter of institutional limits:

Uncategorized: Gastronomic epistemology

Lisa Heldke writes, “For theories like Descartes’ [which] conceive of my body as an external appendage to my mind, and see its role in inquiry as merely to provide a set of (fairly reliable) sensory data on which my reasoning faculty then operates to produce objects of knowledge.  But growing and cooking food are important counterexamples to this view; they are activities in which bodily perceptions are more than meter reading which must be scrutinized by reason.  The knowing involved in making a cake is ‘contained’ not simply ‘in my head’ but in my hands, my wrists, my eyes and nose as well.  The phrase ‘bodily knowledge’ is not a metaphor.  It is an acknowledgement of the fact that I know things literally with my body, that I, ‘as’ my hands, know when the bread dough is sufficiently kneaded, and I ‘as’ my nose know when the pie is done.”

Two things: Similar things might be said about sports, playing a musical instrument, woodworking, and any number of human activities.  When do we get a sufficient number of counterexamples of anomalies to decide that the Cartesian model is no longer useful?

Second: What would modern philosophy had been like if Descartes had prepared his own meals?

Uncategorized: Flame of Yah

Francis Landy (Paradoxes of Paradise: Identity and Difference in the Song of Songs (Bible and Literature Series)) argues that the phrase shalhebetyah in Song of Songs 8:6 should be taken as a reference to Yah’s own flame, and he connects the fire of Yah in the sanctuary with the fire of Yah in the love between lovers:

“For in Israel, in the dialectics of king and kingdom, the flame of God is constantly alight only on the altar at its centre; it communicates between heaven and earth . . . In the sanctuary, the union and differentiation of lovers is a collective process; there, symbolically, the wealth of the kingdom is reduced to ashes, merged with the divine flame, and renewed.  God, the source of life, is indwelling in the land, and guarantees its continuance.  The shrine is thus the matrix, an inner confine, and the earth, the generative flame.  There the king and the Beloved participate in the creative current that infuses the lovers at the centre of their world.”

Uncategorized: Prophecy and miracles

Hume thought his arguments against miracles applied to prophecy as well.  Miracles cannot serve as proof of the truth of Christianity because miracles violate natural law and because our knowledge of them rests on unreliable testimony rather than direct observation.  So too prophecy: “What we have said of miracles may be applied, without any variation, to prophecies; and indeed, all prophecies are real miracles, and as such only, can be admitted as proofs of any revelation.”

In a 1999 article in the Journal of the History of Ideas, however, Peter Harrison points out that Hume’s earliest Christian opponents recognized the flaw in extending Hume’s argument from miracles to prophecy.

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Bible - NT - Matthew Uncategorized: Pharisees and tombs

Pharisees of course are mentioned throughout Matthew’s gospel.  After Jesus’ scathing denunciation at the temple (Matthew 23), they disappear for most of the rest of the gospel.  They appear one last time, along with the chief priests, asking for a seal on Jesus’ tomb (27:62).

It’s fitting: The last time we saw Pharisees Jesus was denouncing them for “building the tombs of the prophets and adorning the monuments of the righteous,” while confessing they are sons of those who murder prophets (23:29).  They prove they are sons of prophet-murderers once again.  They want to seal the tomb (taphos) of Jesus, proving that they are whited sepulchers (taphos) themselves (23:27).

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