According to Rowan Williams (Arius), the central concern is with the freedom of God’s will. Arius insists that God is self-subsistent, and because he is immaterial he is “without any kind of plurality or composition.” If the Son is eternally with God, then there is something beside God that qualifies or limits Him, and God is unlimited. To be in relation is to be limited and qualified, and God is absolute. As Williams says, “if God is free in respect... Read more
1 Chronicles 2 gives a family tree for Judah. The following chapter focuses in on the royal family of David. The overall structure is chiastic: A. Sons born in Hebron. B. List of six sons born in Hebron, with mothers. C. He reigned in Hebron for seven years and six months. C’. He reigned in Jerusalem for 33 years. B’. List of four sons born of Bath-shua, and nine more whose mothers are not listed. A’. All the sons of... Read more
A friend pointed me to this remarkable statement from Augustine’s de doctrina Christiana. Augustine is distinguishing between uti and frui, use and enjoyment, emphasizing that the only thing that can be enjoyed in itself, rather than for the sake of something else, is God. He elaborates with a brief Trinitarian confession: “The true objects of enjoyment, then, are the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, who are at the same time the Trinity, one Being, supreme above all,... Read more
Pericles is a drama of grief, loss, despair, ultimately a drama of joy, recovery and hope. At critical junctures in the play, music and story-telling play a redemptive role. Pericles uses music as a metaphor for love, licit and illicit, in the first scene of the play. When he discovers the terrible secret of Antiochus’s incest with his daughter, Pericles tells the daughter: You are a fair viol, and your sense the strings; Who, finger’d to make man his lawful... Read more
Peter Berger recently analyzed the state of the Anglican communion in The American Interest. The missionaries who were sent to Africa brought a gospel and Victorian morality. They succeeded in converting many in Africa to Christianity, and these converts conformed their lives to the morals the missionaries taught. Now the North has drifted from Victorian puritanism, but the South has not. The success of the Anglican mission to Africa now haunts the former missionaries. Berger notes that the division is... Read more
Alan Jacobs takes issue with Corey Robin’s essay on “How Intellectuals Create a Public,” where he argues that public intellectuals shouldn’t write for readers who already exist but “summon” a new public into being. Jacobs says that Robin writes a lot about summoning, which, Jacobs says, has two or three meanings: “first, a lord summons a servant; in the second, a magician summons a spirit. (Maybe three, if you add a court of law issuing a summons.)” What’s common is... Read more
My daughter MargaretAnn wrote a paper for school on angels in the book of Psalms. She observed that angels do what men do. Angels are fierce warriors (Psalm 78:49), obey God (Psalm 103:20), praise God (Psalm 148:2). This is a summary of what human beings are called to do. The logic is this: God created human beings under the angels, but destined to be elevated above angels. The first covenant was the covenant of humanity’s childhood, when we were under... Read more
Joshua Kurlantzick defines State Capitalism as “countries whose government has a controlling ownership stake in more than one-third of the 500 largest companies, by revenue, in that country, a situation that gives these governments far greater control over the corporate sector than a government in a more free-market oriented nation like the United States or the United Kingdom.” By this definition, state capitalism is on the rise, in China for example: “contrary to the impression perpetuated by top Chinese leaders... Read more
Matthew Avery Sutton’s American Apocalypse tells the story of American Evangelicalism by telling the story of premillennial apocalyptic eschatology. The approach throws some fresh light on recent history. For example, he links premillennialism to the crusading of the Moral Majority: “As humankind approached the last days, the faithful believed that a series of cultural and moral signs would herald the coming apocalypse. Jesus had told his disciples that at the time of his return conditions would parallel those that forced... Read more
In ancient Israel, the vast majority of those circumcised were circumcised as infants. If one were developing a theology of circumcision, it wouldn’t make sense to focus on the comparatively rare adolescent or adult circumcisions. What is normal in practice would naturally be the norm of theology. In the two-millennia history of the church, the vast majority of those baptized were baptized as infants. Yet, baptismal theology is often developed, even among paedobaptists, as if infant baptism were the exception... Read more
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