1 John 2:13-14 twice says that groups within the church “know the one from the beginning.” That is a perfectly fine way to translate it, but the Greek has TON AP’ ARXES, “the from the beginning.” To whom is this phrase referring? The more awkward translation suggests the possibility that it’s talking about the Son rather than the Father: The little children know the One who is from the ARCHE, and the ARCHE, the beginning of origin, is the Father;... Read more
1 John 2:13-14 twice says that groups within the church “know the one from the beginning.” That is a perfectly fine way to translate it, but the Greek has TON AP’ ARXES, “the from the beginning.” To whom is this phrase referring? The more awkward translation suggests the possibility that it’s talking about the Son rather than the Father: The little children know the One who is from the ARCHE, and the ARCHE, the beginning of origin, is the Father;... Read more
The sequence from 1 John 2:14-15 seems abrupt: John moves from addressing children, fathers, and young men to the warning not to love the world. But there is a link between the “overcoming” in 2:14 to the “world” in 2:15. Every other time the verb “overcome” is used in John, it is closely linked with the Christian’s relationship with the “world.” 4:4: “You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you... Read more
The doctrine of original sin is bound up with the conviction that the past inheres in the present, for the human race and for individuals. And for this the denial of original sin is the necessary premise for all revolutionary politics and also explains why revolutionary politics invariably ends up in Terror. Revolutionaries believe man can be regenerated by the removal of oppressive institutional and ideological structures, but this makes sense only on the premise that human beings are inherently... Read more
Few have said it with the forthrightness of Joseph II, the Habsburg emperor from 1780 to 1790, who justified his 1781 Edict of Toleration because “with freedom of religion, one religion will remain, that of guiding all citizens alike to the welfare of the state. Without this approach we shall not save any greater number of souls, and we shall lose a great many more useful and essential people.” Read more
Since Carl Becker’s book on the heavenly city of the philosophes, historians have recognized that the Enlightenment was motivated, by a secularized version of the biblical story – a fall from the Golden Age of the classical world into the darkness of superstitution and priestcraft, the gospel of Enlightenment and daring to think. But Becker was not the first to recognize the paradoxically irrational commitment to reason among the philosophes. Two of the early critics of the revolution, Burke and... Read more
Battle lines are never, in reality, as clean as we see them in retrospect. Some 700 of the 20,000 freemasons in pre-Revolutionary France were Catholic clergy, and Michael Burleigh reports that “revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, clergy and laity shared a taste for the same authors. In 1778 Marie Antoinette attended the opening night of Voltaire’s last play . . . . Her consort, Louis XVI, read Montesquieu and Voltaire, along with Corneille and La Fontaine, in the Temple where he was... Read more
One aspect of the rise of “discipline” that Foucault traces is the development of what he calls the sciences of the individual. These are dependent upon the development of a network of techniques of gathering and recording information – “the accumulation of documents, their seriation, the organization of comparative fields making it possible to classify, to form categories, to determine averages, to fix norms.” Hospitals in particular were “laboratories for scriptuary and documentary methods . . . . (more…) Read more
Discussing Nietzsche’s view of nobility, Alphonso Lingis emphasizes the role of forgetfulness. Though he’s not writing theology, this is (making necessary allowances) one of the best descriptions of the existential effects of justification by faith that I’ve run across. I’m sure it’s been studied by someone, but it makes me wonder about Luther’s influence on Nietzsche. “What, then, is characteristically noble in the ability to forget: not merely forgive one’s hurts and humiliations, one’s impotencies, but what is more to... Read more
Kolakowski describes the New Left revolution of the 60s as an “explosion of academic youth” and “an aggressive movement born of frustration.” It “easily created a vocabulary for itself out of Marxist slogans, or some expressions from the Marxist story: liberation, revolution, alienation, etc.” Yet, in fact, “its ideology really has little in common with Marxism.” He enumerates: “It consists of ‘revolution’ without the working class; hatred of modern technology as such (Marx glorified technical progress and believed that one... Read more
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