Ryan Leif Hansen (Silence and Praise) observes that the command to “Come” frames the book of Revelation. As the Lamb opens the first four seals, each of the four living creatures calls for a horseman to “Come” (6:1-8), and the book ends with three more commands. The Spirit and bride, and the one who hears the book, join in saying “Come” (2x in 22:17). Then an unnamed speaker (John?) ends with “Come, Lord Jesus.” Presumably the Spirit, bride, and hearer... Read more
In an essay on Congar’s Tradition and Traditions in the first volume of God Without Measure, John Webster asks what a “Protestant admirer” might say about Congar’s, and Catholicism’s, project of ressourcement. He objects to the characterization of Protestantism that is embedded in the project: “It ‘explains’ Protestantism by presenting it as part of the larger malformation of Western Christianity after the Gregorian Reform.” He admits that there is some truth to this assessment, but argues that “it ought not to be... Read more
The history of language is the a history of “extinction,” writes John McWhorter at The Atlantic. But there’s a contrary trend: “new dialects have been emerging in cities worldwide, and it’s young people—specifically, the children of immigrants—who are driving the trend. One of the surprising consequences of the current wave of mass migration into Europe is, in fact, likely to be the development of ever more new ways of speaking in the future.” Arabs and Turks who come to Germany, for instance,... Read more
John Knox’s influence on the modern world has been enormous. He shaped the Scottish Reformed church, and so shaped the faith and culture of the corners of the world to which Scottish Reformed missionaries and pastors spread. Yet, it’s been nearly thirty years since we’ve seen a major biography. As the TLS reviewer of Jane Dawson’s John Knox observes, this is not for lack of evidence. Yet the evidence presents subtle challenges: “so much of it is filtered through Knox himself,... Read more
Ryan Leif Hansen doesn’t think it’s accurate to say that apocalyptic depictions of evil are “dualistic” (Silence and Praise). At the very least, the kind of dualism needs to be specified. Hansen writes, “evil is the result of a resistance to divine rule and order, and a transgressing of divinely instituted boundaries throughout the cosmos. Evil is, therefore, not a problem strewn randomly through God’s cosmos, but exists as an alternative order, corrupting the goodness of God’s entire creation.” It... Read more
The Iliad was the virtual Bible of the Greek world. As Plato says in the Republic, some Greeks (not Plato!) believed that Homer “educated Hellas and that he deserves to be taken up as an instructor in the management and culture of human affairs, and that a man ought to regulate the whole of his life by following this poet.” The popularity of Homer can be gauged by the number of copies or fragments of his poems that have been found. By 1963,... Read more
The gospel is all about teaching us to walk. Once we walked, zombie-like, in death and sin (Ephesians 2:1), but God raised us in Christ to walk in good works (2:10). We used to walk like the Gentiles, in darkness and dissipation, without God in the world. Now that we are in Christ and delivered from death, Paul says, we are called to walk, and to walk together, in a particular manner. In Ephesians 2, Paul said that through the... Read more
According to TLS reviewer David Morgan, Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads is the fruit of teenage dissatisfaction with world history: “Frankopan tells us that as a teenager he became increasingly dissatisfied with the version of history he had been taught: essentially the ‘Rise of the West,’ in which Greece led to Rome, to Christian Europe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, democracy and the Industrial Revolution: ultimately European and American domination of the civilized world. This worry was reinforced by a treasured childhood... Read more
Berkeley is an anti-abstractionist. What is abstraction? Berkeley is basically taking on Locke, who argues (in Berkeley’s telling) that our process of thought works something liek this: We have a particular thing that invariably has a combination of qualities. But those qualities are abstractions. We can see resemblances among things: a red rose, red car, red coat, red dress, but “red” never appears in our experience except as an attribute of some thing. From the repeated occurences, we can “frame... Read more
. He There is often a gap between the popular perception of a philosopher’s teaching and his own conception of his teaching. But the gap in Berkeley’s case is particularly wide. On the one hand, there is his own professed plan to justify common sense and combat skepticism. He reiterates this intention in the first of his three dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. The latter, who represents Berkeley’s position, gets Hylas to agree that the opinion must be true that “upon... Read more
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