According to Paul, the church is being built into a holy dwelling, a temple in which the Spirit dwells. This has many implications, but let me highlight one. According to the Old Testament, temples were holy places whose holiness had to be guarded and defended. Levites guarded the tabernacle and temple armed with swords to prevent any unauthorized person, any stranger, from drawing near. By protecting the holy place, the Levites were protecting all Israel. If a stranger, got into... Read more
From Francis Bacon’s De Augmentis Scientiarum , 7.1: “For as the fable goes of the basilisk, that if he sees you first, you die for it, but if you see him first, he dies; so itis with deceits, impostures, and evil arts, which, if they be first espied, they lose their life, but if they prevent [come first] they endanger; so that we are much beholden to Machiavelli and other writers of that class, who openly and unfeignedly declare or... Read more
Orestes Brownson has some sharp insights on the purposes and effects of social contract theory as developed by early modern theorists. He recognizes that Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau have detached social contract ideas from their original mooring in Christian thought and “abused the phrase borrowed from the theologians and made it cover a political doctrine which they would have been the last to accept.” Such theorists “imagined a state of nature antecedently to civil society in which men lived without... Read more
Poetry is a concentrated excess of language. Concentrated because it always means more than it says. Excessive because it always says more than it needs to say, because in many cases it need not be said at all. Concentration: “The Lord is my shepherd” unlatches a window on an alternative world, in which God is a shepherd, men are sheep, lives are pathways, providential discipline is a rod, etc etc. Excess: Marvell could have said: “It’s late, and we’re going... Read more
Thinking about Plato’s Crito, it again strikes me that NOMOS is closer to what our “culture” than to “law.” If Paul is entering into a Greek debate about NOMOS (as well, of course, as a Jewish one), then he’s critiquing the notion that justice can be achieved through the institutions of culture. Romans stands not only against Greek experiments in utopia through NOMOS, but against Matthew Arnold (as Arnold no doubt realized he stood against Romans). Read more
CONTEXT AND STRUCTURE Proverbs 8 follows Proverbs 7. In chapter 7, Solomon records the speech of Lady Folly, the adulteress, who entices the simple to her house for a night of love-making. In chapter 8, Solomon records the speech of Lady Wisdom, who offers herself as the means to rule, honor, and wealth. The two speeches form a diptych (Waltke), and contrast two paths that are set before the young man, the hero of the romantic drama of Proverbs. Lady... Read more
Last week, The New Republic posted a lengthy article by Jerry Coyne on Intelligent Design (ID) on its web site, along with a brief piece by Leon Wieseltier. Yesterday, the local paper carried a brief excerpt from the Columbus, Ohio, Dispatch, claiming that ID should be recognized as veiled philosophy and religion rather than as science. Of course, the impetus for this flurry is the result of Bush’s favorable comments about ID, but the transmission is intriguing: From the Washington... Read more
INTRODUCTION According to Ephesians, the gospel is about God’s formation of a new humanity. This is true in two senses: First, in Jesus, the Last Adam, believers are made new Adams and Eves; and, second, in Jesus the divided human race is united into a new family, the temple of God. THE TEXT “And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the... Read more
Milbank argues that, given its ontology of violence, paganism can only respond to violence with a counter-violence of its own. Political and social thus do not rest on peaceful donation or harmony but on the threat and actual practice of violence. This view could be refined by introducing redemptive history. It appears that Torah is precisely an order of counter-violence that (in Hammerton-Kelly’s terminology) “constrained trespasses for the time being.” In this sense (and no doubt others), Torah was one... Read more
Robert Louis Wilken has a very fine piece on the “church’s way of speaking” in the Aug/Sept issue of First Things. He points out that the church’s faith is not merely “doctrinal propositions, creedal affirmations, and moral codes” but “a world of discourse that comes to us in language of a particular sort.” Further, “Christian speech is not primarily the technical vocabulary of Christian doctrine” but “the language of the Psalms, the stories of the patriarchs, the parables of the... Read more
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