Jesus’ condemnation of the Pharisees’ concern with the “outside” is remarkable. He condemns them for cleaning the outside of the plate and cut without concern for the robbery and wickedness within. That looks like a simple opposition of inner v. outer purity, however much Jesus combines the two in v 40. But the combination is not just a juxtaposition, as if Jesus saw the internal and external man as separate entities pressed and glued together. The climax comes in v... Read more
One way to make the point above about Michael Denton and Philip Johnson is to say that they are “prophets” in the sense that Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Jim Jordan use the term: They create a new future with their words. Read more
In Luke 11, the charge that Jesus is in league with the devil comes immediately after Jesus’ teaching on prayer, and there are verbal connections between the two sections of the chapter. One of the most important is the fact taht some of the people in the crowd “test” Jesus by demanding a sign from heaven (v. 16). Jesus has just taught His disciples to pray that they would not be led into temptation (v. 4), and the word “temptation”... Read more
Thomas Woodward has written a fascinating history of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement in Doubts About Darwin (Baker, 2003). His focus is on the history of the rhetoric of the debate (examining the ethos of each participant, the appeals to pathos, as well as the logos). Along the way, he explores how the different sides in the debate differ in their mode of telling the story of Darwinism, the development of evolutionary theory, and so on. This vantage point makes... Read more
In her introduction to the current Semeia volume, Eskenazi argues that the biblical writers rarely use ring or chiastic constructions. The ones that are “found” are, in her opinion, usually unconvincing. But she offers a more philosophical reason for the Bible’s avoidance of chiasm: In a Levinasian vein, she claims that the biblical writers resist closure and that chiasmus is complicit with totality. This, in my view, is a misconception of chiasm. If one follow John Breck’s account in his... Read more
The current issue of Semeia , edited by Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, is devoted to studies of the influence of Levinas on biblical studies and the influence of the Bible on Levinas. Ezkenazi’s introduction lays out the basic categories and the fundamental flow of Levinas’s thought. Reading it, I was continually reminded of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who is not mentioned (though Buber and Rosenzweig are): there’s the same emphasis on the primacy of heteronomy and on the necessity of the Other to... Read more
A very interesting article in the same issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas by Rod Preece of Wilfrid Laurier University. He examines the effect of Darwinism on moral debates about treatment of animals during the 19th century, and concludes that Darwinism had little appreciable effect. Many of the animal rights advocates of that time were Christians, mostly non-Conformist Evangelicals (Preece cites Paul Johnson to this effect). Preece concludes, “The customary tale of how Darwin’s theory of evolution... Read more
Emily Michael in the July 2003 issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas examines the views of John Wyclif on atoms, hylomorphism, and the mind-body problem, and argues that he represented a “first step towards a modern account of the structure of material substances,” but a step that remained well within the “context of an Aristotelian natural philosophy.” How did Wyclif combine an Aristotelian hylomorphism with a belief in the atomic structure of material substances? Essentially by accepting... Read more
Emily Michael in the July 2003 issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas examines the views of John Wyclif on atoms, hylomorphism, and the mind-body problem, and argues that he represented a “first step towards a modern account of the structure of material substances,” but a step that remained well within the “context of an Aristotelian natural philosophy.” How did Wyclif combine an Aristotelian hylomorphism with a belief in the atomic structure of material substances? Essentially by accepting... Read more
Philip Turner, currently Vice President of the Anglican Communion Institute and former Dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, has a very incisive article on the current crisis in ECUSA in this month’s edition of First Things . A few quotations: First, he refers to ECUSA’s effort to fashion itself into a “bridge church” that avoided the rigidity of both American Catholicism and American (fundamentalist) Protestantism. One sign of this was the 1966 decision concerning Bishop James Pike’s claim that... Read more
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