Green points out too the grammatical shift between Luke 14:23 and v 24: He moves from narrating a story in third person to a direct address. This is still the master speaking to the slave, but it is also the master speaking over the head of the slave to the assembled Pharisees. Green quotes Linnemann: the master “steps as it were on to the apron of the stage and addresses the audience.” I wonder how long it took for the... Read more
Joel Green points out that the TEXT of Luke actually displays the table practices of Jesus. In Luke 14, the scene is a meal in the home of a leading Pharisee, yet several people show up that we don’t expect to be at the home of a leading Pharisee: Jesus, and the man with dropsy (who would be considered marginal if not positively unclean). Luke’s cast of characters, in short, his “dramatis personae” is a textual display of the table... Read more
Joel Green points out that the TEXT of Luke actually displays the table practices of Jesus. In Luke 14, the scene is a meal in the home of a leading Pharisee, yet several people show up that we don’t expect to be at the home of a leading Pharisee: Jesus, and the man with dropsy (who would be considered marginal if not positively unclean). Luke’s cast of characters, in short, his “dramatis personae” is a textual display of the table... Read more
In his splendid Beauty of the Infinite (about which more later), David Hart says something to the effect that “the church has no argument deeper or more basic than Jesus.” That is a remarkably concise way of undercutting a certain kind of theology, one that attempts to establish some kind of parameters for theology in nature, or contemporary culture, or whatever. It is a profoundly evangelical move (though Hart is Orthodox), and at the same time a profoundly Catholic. And,... Read more
Sermon outline, January 11: Table Talk, Luke 14:1-35 INTRODUCTION Meals were central to Jesus’ ministry. He comes “eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34). His meals are not just for refreshment, but are opportunities for teaching and one of Jesus’ key “methods” for forming a new Israel. The people He eats with, often outcasts, are the seeds of a new Israel, and the meal is both a sign of the presence of the kingdom and a visible realization of that kingdom. If... Read more
In the midst of saying some very odd and wacky things, Jack Miles does have some insights to offer in his God: A Biography . Most especially, there’s his notion that the unity of the Bible (he’s dealing with the OT) lies in the fact that it has a single main character, God. God is the hero of the story, and ultimately (I say, against Miles) a comic hero, a triumphant hero (not, as Miles says, a silent, nearly dead,... Read more
Further thoughts from Steiner, and also inspired by Steiner: 1) The dilemma of tragic drama in the modern world, he claims, was that the two main “ideologies” available (at the time of writing, 1961) are Marxism and Christianity, both of which are “anti-tragic.” 2) Steiner points out that Rousseau, with his sunny view of human nature and denial of original sin, undermined the tragic outlook thoroughly. With Rousseau, the evils of human society are the product of perverse social and... Read more
Ibsen, Steiner argues, did not write tragedies. Ibsen wrote “dramatic rhetoric” calling society to reform. For real tragedy, there is no such “solution” to be found, there is no remedy, except destructive sacrifice and perhaps a deus ex machina. From this angle, tragedy is perhaps among the STOICHEIA that prepared the Greeks for the gospel, a Greek version of Levitical sacrificial ritual. It is the “law” half of the Lutheran law-gospel sequence, because it demonstrates that man is hopelessly at... Read more
Some more quotations from Steiner’s Death of Tragedy : “We cannot understand the romantic movement if we do not perceive at the heart of it the impulse toward drama . . . . The romantic mode is neither an ordering nor a criticism of life; it is a dramatization. And at the origins of the romantic movement lies an explicit attempt to revitalize the major forms of tragedy. In fact, romanticism began as a critique of the failure of the... Read more
Some thoughts on NT Wright’s Rutherford House Lecture, August 2003. I have little disagreement with much of the lecture, and it clarified a number of things for me. Wright’s views on justification, however, continue to puzzle me at a number of points. Here’s an attempt to clarify my (or NTW’s) confusions. 1) Like John Murray, he says that “call” is the biblical term for conversion. And “faith is itself the first fruit of the Spirit’s call.” Great. 2) But then... Read more
Leithart
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