God In Us INTRODUCTION Confessing that God the Son was incarnate as the baby Jesus is once of the church’s non-negotiable beliefs, however offensive it is to high-minded reason. But the church has often placed a wrong stress on the incarnation, as if God becoming man were in itself sufficient for our salvation or as if the presence of God in human flesh by itself sanctified, redeemed, and glorified fallen mankind. Against this, the Scriptures teach that our salvation is... Read more
There are strange doings in the Reformed world these days. One of the strangest I’ve come across recently are comments from one Reformed elder who complained that NT Wright’s views on justification were introducing a new Romanism. According to this writer, it is no defense of Wright to point out that he insists that justification is a forensic act, since today even Roman Catholic theologians admit that. This is bizarre in the extreme. Five hundred years ago, Protestants would have... Read more
Since I’ve said some favorable things about Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style , I should mention Anne Hollander’s very smart review in the December 22 TNR . Hollander is, after all, far better qualified than I to speak on matters of taste and fashion. One of Hollander’s essential points against Postrel is that the current trend is not so much the exaltation of design, since design was a key feature of modernist aesthetics and culture. What is new is... Read more
James Wood has an intriguing and self-revealing review of new translations of Leon Battista Alberti’s Momus and Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly in the December 22 issue of The New Republic . He begins with a contrast between antique comedy, which is “comedy of correction” and “modern” comedy, which is a “comedy of forgiveness.” (His use of “religious” and “secular,” corresponding to the ancient and modern respectively, is unfortunate and confuses the good points he makes.) He describes the comedy... Read more
Why music? Well, for instance: What I want my life to be is better expressed by a 2-minute segment the Canzona of Beethoven’s A minor string quartet than by any words I could ever speak or write, expressed all at once in multiple registers and nuances. To say it all would be to try to say something infinite; but it can be expressed musically with a few stringed instruments in a couple of minutes. Read more
Graham Ward, writing about the “displaced body of Jesus,” argues that “none of us has access to bodies as such, only to bodies that are mediated through the giving and receiving of signs.” To which I want to say, Hmmm. On the one hand, I want to agree that our knowledge of another, and even of another’s body, comes to us in coded forms that are always already there. Strip away the culturally coded accoutrements of clothing, and you still... Read more
The current issue of Semeia (#45) is devoted to “New Testament Masculinities,” and is a contribution to the growing academic study of masculinity. Jerome Neyrey has an interesting article here on Jesus’ masculinity in the gospel of Matthew. Two of his conclusions are particularly noteworthy: 1) “Matthew rarely locates [Jesus] ‘inside’ and mentions no duties that he has toward his household, either to mother, wife, or children. He appears in the ‘private’ world of nonrelated males and females (e.g., in... Read more
The current issue of Semeia (#45) is devoted to “New Testament Masculinities,” and is a contribution to the growing academic study of masculinity. Jerome Neyrey has an interesting article here on Jesus’ masculinity in the gospel of Matthew. Two of his conclusions are particularly noteworthy: 1) “Matthew rarely locates [Jesus] ‘inside’ and mentions no duties that he has toward his household, either to mother, wife, or children. He appears in the ‘private’ world of nonrelated males and females (e.g., in... Read more
A couple of thoughts on the Renaissance, inspired by Spenser: First, Spenser’s emphasis on the proper use of the body (Book 2 of the Faerie Queene , the book of temperance) highlights the anti-Platonic thrust of Spenser’s viewpoint. That was, if Greenblatt is to be believed, a central thrust of Renaissance ethics, in which “style” or “self-fashioning” and “ethic” were not sharply distinct. Or, to put it another way, aesthetic and ethic were not sharply distinct. Something to investigate further.... Read more
There are a number of allusions to the original creation account in the account of Babel in Genesis 11. First, there is the general point that Yahweh is destroying what men have built ?Ea rebellious creation “decreated” by Yahweh. Second, the creation echoes are strengthened by Yahweh’s sarcastic “let us” in 11:5, which echoes with the “let us” of 1:26. In the first chapter of Genesis, Yahweh counsels together to create man, while in chapter 11, Yahweh takes counsel to... Read more
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