1 Kings 12:25-13:34 hangs together as a single unit. The chapter break is very bad. There is a clear inclusion between 12:25-31:3 and 13:33-34. The oracle of the prophet of Bethel in 13:32 brings up the altar in Bethel and the ?houses of the high places?Ethat were mentioned in 12:31, 33. Further, 13:33-34 repeats some things from the 12:30-31 in reverse order. As Jerome Walsh has pointed out, there is a chiastic inclusio around the whole passage: a. This thing... Read more
Is the begetting of the Son an act of God’s will or nature. Barth, with the tradition, says that it is not an act of God’s will if will means the freedom to be thus or not to be thus. “God cannot not be God,” and Barth is correct that this is identical to the statement “He cannot not be Father and cannot be without the Son. His freedom or aseity in respect of Himself consists in His freedom, not... Read more
Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered America (New York: William Morrow, 2002), 552 pp. Pursuing his passion for medieval cartography, Gavin Menzies, a veteran of the British Royal Navy, discovered a 1424 Venetian map that showed four strangely named islands. He concluded that two of them ?Eidentified by the Portuguyese names Antilia and Satanazes on the chart ?Edepicted Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe. Further investigation showed that the Portuguese, for whom the chart was made, did not know the islamds... Read more
Peter Hanns Reill, ed., and Ellen Judy Wilson, principal author, Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (revised edition; New York: Facts on File, 2004), 670pp. Contemporary critics of modernity, including Christian ones, often focus their attacks on ?The Enlightenment,?Ethe intellectual and cultural movement that endured through the ?long eighteenth century?Ebetween Louis XIV and Napoleon. Castigated by its critics for its rationalism and rigorous logic-chopping, ?The Enlightenment?Eis seen as the source for many of the evils of contemporary social, intellectual, and political life.... Read more
William Langewiesche, The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime (New York: North Point Press, 2004), 239pp. Landlubbers that we are, most tend to forget that, as William Langewiesche puts it, “our world is an ocean world.” First published as a series of articles in The Atlantic , Langewiesche’s book opens the ocean world vividly to those of us who rarely see beyond the three-mile horizon visible from the beach. Populated by tens of thousands of merchant ships... Read more
Marjorie Garber offers many interesting insights into the themes of Shakespeare?s Comedy of Errors in her recent Shakespeare After All . Here are several of the highlights of her analysis: 1) She points out that, like many of Shakespeare?s comedies, the crisis of Comedy of Errors is provoked by ?an inflexible law?Eand ?the law?s impersonal enforcement.?EThe play opens with the Syracusan merchant Egeon facing death because of his visit to Ephesus, intercourse between the cities having been strictly forbidden by... Read more
INTRODUCTION When the prophet Shemaiah confronted Rehoboam, the king turned from his plan (1 Kings 12:21-24). But Jeroboam is not so responsive to the word of the Lord. A man of God from Judah confronts him at his altar at Bethel (13:1-3), and Jeroboam responds by trying to arrest the man of God (13:4). But the word of the king is nothing compared to the word of Yahweh. As the man of God finds, the word of Yahweh always comes... Read more
Richard Neuhaus has his gleeful fun attacking John Milbank in the November 2004 issue of First Things . I don’t think he’s entirely fair to Milbank’s political thought, and his charge that Milbank’s attack on the Catholic Church is an “annoyingly unremitting rant” that is “mainly a product of deep-seated personal prejudice” verges close to the borderlands of rant itself (though, to be sure, a refreshingly remitting one). Neuhaus scores some points in pointing to the invisibility of Milbank’s church... Read more
Barth interestingly ( CD 1.1, p. 410) suggests a correspondence between soteriology and Trinitarian theology: “reconciliation or revelation is not creation or a continuation of creation but rather an inconceivably new work above and beyond creation, so we have also to say that the Son is not the Father but that here, in this work, the one God, though not without the Father, is the Son or Word of the Father.” And he criticizes Schleiermacher for “consistently” treating reconciliation as... Read more
And built Yarav?am Shechem in the hills of Ephraim. And he lived in it. And he went out from there and built Penu?el. And said Yarav?am in his heart, ?Now returns the kingdom to the house of David. If this people ascends to make sacrifices in the house of Yahweh in Yerushalaim And returns the heart of this people to their master, to Rechav?am, king of Yehudah, And they will kill me And they will return to Rechav?am, king of... Read more
Leithart
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