INTRODUCTION 2 John is written into a crisis situation. As Jesus predicted, antichrists have “gone into the world” (v. 7), deceiving those who are not on guard. John writes to warn about the deceivers, and to tell the church how to respond to them. THE TEXT “The Elder, to the elect lady and her children, whom I love in truth, and not only I, but also all those who have known the truth, because of the truth which abides in... Read more
1 John 5:21: Little children, guard yourselves from idols. John tells us that those who are begotten of God are not dominated by sin, and that the one begotten of God keeps him from the evil one. It’s not clear here who is doing the guarding. Is the “Begotten One” who guards us from Satan Jesus? Or are we supposed to guard ourselves? (more…) Read more
1 John 5:13: “These things I have written to those who believe into the name of the Son of God, in order that you may know that you have eternal life.” We are all born into the world bearing the name of Adam, with his heritage and his destiny. Baptism assigns us a different name, the name of the Last Adam. According to Jesus’ instructions in the Great Commission, the church is to baptize the nations into the “name” of... Read more
Each week, we kneel to confess our own sins and then go on to pray for the universal church, the nations, and the world. It’s obvious why we confess our sins. We are seeking forgiveness and cleansing. We are praying for one another as we pray together. The prayer for forgiveness we’re currently using is a “we” prayers. As John says, “If anyone sees a brother sinning a sin not to death, he shall ask and he will give life... Read more
Prayer, Rosenstock-Huessy says, is “doubtful, agitated, despairing, searching.” Prayer desperately seeks answers. When prayer cools into a “residue,” it’s called “research”: “If research is real, it still has the dignity of prayer, although it is the last and most cooled-off phase of genuine prayer.” This cooling process is evident in the history of theology. Augustine writes Confessions as prayer, as Anselm does his Proslogion . Aquinas looks cool, but there are stories about Aquinas agonizing in prayer over some point... Read more
Rosenstock-Huessy notes that the ancient world observed a division of labor with regard to speech: “Women are expected to contribute wild, passionate, inarticulate shouts of blind feeling. Men are expected to build on this natural stratum the structure of high and articulate speech . . . . Women and children yell, weep, shake; men act and speak.” Against this background, Paul’s instructions for women to be silent have a different impact than is often thought: (more…) Read more
Historical Jesus studies, Rosenstock-Huessy claims, attempt to reduce the four gospels to a single unified story, turning the gospels into “material for our reconstruction of the life of Jesus from all the material.” Or, historical Jesus studies attempt to place Jesus among the ancients: “He belonged with antiquity. He was speaking, thinking, praying, teaching like many men of ancient times.” The whole purpose was to find the Jesus “behind” the sources. This is impossible, since the sources are eyewitnesses or... Read more
It has become popular to describe the gospels as biographies, but Rosenstock-Huessy pre-challenged this trend (no doubt reacting to the lives-of-Jesus movement of the 18th and 19th centuries). Ancient biographies, he claims were actually “thanatographies,” while “the story of Jesus makes sense only when his death begins and antecedes our lives.” If the story of the gospel ends with the death of the biographess, Jesus remains “uninteresting”: “If the tomb of Jesus is not the womb of the Christian era,... Read more
Christopher Smart wrote Jubilate Agno while confined in a madhouse. He would have said, no doubt, he found his sanity there. Newtonians, they are the madmen: For Newton’s notion of colours is ALOGOS unphilosophical. For the colours are spiritual . . . . NOW that colour is spiritual appears inasmuch as the blessing of God upon all things descends in colour. For the blessing of health upon the human face is in colour. For the blessing of God upon purity... Read more
On page 159 of her extraordinary Rituals of Spontaneity , Lori Branch writes an “if” as an “id.” Read more
Leithart
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