From beginning to end, from Alpha to Omega, God is a God of life, a God of resurrection. In the beginning, He called into being things that were not. He cried out into the darkness of the first day, so that light dispelled the darkness. He spoke again, and plants sprang from the dead earth and fish swam in the turbulent seas. He raised up Adam from the dust to become a living soul, and He put Adam into deep... Read more
Resurrection life isn’t only for the future, not only for the end. Because Jesus rose on the third day, and because He poured out His Spirit on us, resurrection life has already begun to spread throughout this world of Sin and Death. Through Jesus and His Spirit, we already live the life of the resurrection in the body, even as we look forward to the resurrection of our bodies. (more…) Read more
More from Targoff, discussing Hamlet’s relation to the differing views of worship in the Elizabethan period. Targoff complains that “what is strikingly, and mistakenly, absent from our accounts of the Elizabethan settlement is precisely what the play interrogates in staging Claudius’s prayer: the belief that external practices might not only reflect but also potentially transform the internal self . . . Hamlet does not, as we might expect, consider the discrepancy he articulated at the beginning of the play between... Read more
Thanks to Jayson Grieser for sending along notes and quotations from Ramie Targoff’s 2001 Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England . Targoff points out that, contrary to what we might think, Protestants were more interested than Catholics in communal worship. “For sixteenth-century Catholics,” she writes, “the challenge of public devotion was not to promote a shared and collective liturgical language, but instead to encourage the worshippers to perform their own private devotions during the priest’s... Read more
Calvin is harsher on allegorical interpretation than almost anyone, yet he is all in favor of typology. David, Zedekiah, Joseph, Aaron, Samson, Joshua, Zerubbabel, Cyrus and others are types of Christ. It is no easy task to discover where he draws the line between allegory and typology, though. At times, the difference has to do with the degree of detail: “All the ancient figures were sure testimonies of God’s grace and of eternal salvation, and thus Christ was represented in... Read more
“Yahweh” is often thought to be a purely modern rendering of the Hebrew name, but Smalley finds a medieval glossator who writes the name as “Iahave.” She goes on: “The ‘monstrous form’ Jehoveh was already known to Christians in the late thirteenth century. Henry Crossy seems to compromise between Jehoveh and Jahweh by writing Iehave . . . . St. Jerome used IHAO; the IABE of the Greek Father, Theodoret, was probably unknown to him; nor was he likely to... Read more
Aquinas rejected Augustine’s dismisal of literal interpretations of the law as “absurdities,” arguing that “the end of the ceremonial precepts was twofold, for they were ordained to divine worship, for that particular time, and to the foreshadowing of Christ.” Applying this principle, he sought for a plausible literal interpretation of the prohibition of boiling kids in their mother’s milk: “Although the kid that is slain has no perception of the manner in which its flesh is cooked, yet it would... Read more
Aquinas rejected Augustine’s dismisal of literal interpretations of the law as “absurdities,” arguing that “the end of the ceremonial precepts was twofold, for they were ordained to divine worship, for that particular time, and to the foreshadowing of Christ.” Applying this principle, he sought for a plausible literal interpretation of the prohibition of boiling kids in their mother’s milk: “Although the kid that is slain has no perception of the manner in which its flesh is cooked, yet it would... Read more
Following Jewish exegetes of his time, Andrew of St. Victor interpreted Isaiah 53 as a prophecy of Israel. Isaiah used the phrase “man of sorrows” to speak “of the people as though of one man.” “Bearing infirmities” refers to “the people who were to suffer in the Babylonian captivity” and thus “were to expiate not only their own sins, but also the sins of the unrighteous.” The hopeful note struck at the end of the chapter teaches that “the stricken... Read more
If the fathers have already explained the Scriptures, Andrew of St. Victor asked, why do I need to? He answered that truth dwells “deep” and “screens herself from mortal sight.” There is always more truth to dig up because truth “hides, yet so as never wholly to be hidden. Careful seekers find her, that, carefully sought, she may again be found. None may draw her forth in her completeness, but by degrees. The fathes and forefathers have found her; something... Read more
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