Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety . New York: Pantheon, 2004. 306pp. “Every adult life,” Alain de Botton argues, “could be said to be defined by two great love stories.” The first is the romantic quest for sexual love and companionship, and it is the subject of innumerable poems, stories, and paintings. The other story is “more secret and shameful,” the story of our “quest for love from the world.” “Status anxiety” refers to our gnawing fear of failure in this... Read more
A perceptive Lutheran reader asked whether I was endorsing an antinomian position in my favorable summary of Kolb’s article on Luther and Chemnitz. He pointed out that Kolb’s position relies on an illegitimate separation of God and His Law, and argued that instead the Law should be seen as an expression of God’s character. Since I’ve been accused of being a “neo-legalist,” it’s a nice change of pace to be read as an antinomian. But this reader’s response did make... Read more
?And the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening, and he would drink from the brook.?E In this morning sermon, we saw how the writer of Kings highlights the authority of Elijah and His power. He speaks, and the heavens become iron, without rain or dew. He tells the widow what to do, and the widow obeys Elijah?s voice. He lays himself out on a dead child, and the boy comes... Read more
So what? So what if Jeroboam made golden calves and worshiped them at Dan and Bethel? So what if the house of Jeroboam was destroyed by Baasha, and the house of Baasha destroyed by Zimri, and Zimri destroyed by Omri, and the house of Omri destroyed by Jehu? What does this ancient history have to do with me, with us? You all have to get up every morning and go to work; you mothers have kids to feed and mountains... Read more
Alain de Botton notes in his book Status Anxiety that many societies see a direct relationship between reputation and self-image. If others hold me in contempt, then I must either defend myself against their contempt or accept their contemptuous assessment. Philosophy introduces a mediator, reason, which assesses and judges reputation for its truth value. If reputation does not match reality, then one can maintain a good self-image in spite of the slings and arrows of society. Philosophy has thus also... Read more
I finally watched The Village . Much of it was perfectly silly. The initial explanation of the dead animals littering the village is that a coyote is on the loose, and this theory is put to rest only when it’s decided that coyotes are not big enough to leave big red marks on doors. They need medicine from “the towns” – why not send the blind girl through the woods? The stilted language and inverted syntax got irritating, and whoever... Read more
Robert Kolb offers this helpful analysis of the differences between Luther and Chemnitz on justification: “Luther understood justification as the execution of the wages of sin . . . upon sinners and their simultaneous resurrectionto new life in Jesus Christ . . . . Chemnitz did not pursue this aspect of the biblical meaning of the word. Thus he missed the opportunity to work out Luther’s understanding of justification in a more completely consistent form. For this defintition of justification... Read more
Oswald Bayer has a typically provocative essay in the Forde Festschrift , in which he explores the cosmic dimensions of justification by faith. A few highlights: 1) He points out that Luther’s explanation of the First Article of the creed already employs the language of justification: The Father provides for us “out of his pure, fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me” (Lutheran readers will, with lapsed Lutherans, say “This is most certainly true”). For... Read more
“The assertion of ‘justification by faith’ in the sixteenth-century Reformation can be understood only if it is clearly seen as a complete break with ‘justification by grace.’” So says Gerhard Forde. Marc Kolden begins a brief essay in By Faith Alone , a Festschrift for Forde, with this quotation. He goes on to explain that “None of the Protestant or Catholic protagonists in the sixteenth century would have denied that justification is by grace or even by grace alone. The... Read more
Some of the highlights of Marjorie Garber’s discussion of Coriolanus . 1) With many critics, she emphasizes the emotional immaturity of the title hero: “Volumnia has refused to ever treat her son like a child, sending him out to war at an early age, and she emphasizes her own values of manhood; he reacts by seeking her approval, overestimating her power, and both anxiously courting her favor and curtly rejecting it. The extended childhood in which this grown man finds... Read more
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