The point of Trinitarian theology is not simply that there are three instead of one. We can’t just plug our pre-conceptions about God into the Trinity, and say that now we are Trinitarian. We can’t assume Deism, the idea that God is a watchmaker who leaves the world to run on its own, and then say that we are Trinitarian because we believe in three watchmakers. We can’t assume that God is sheer power like Allah, and then say we... Read more
Dickens’s Hard Times takes place in Coketown, a coal mining town, focused on a small cluster of characters. There’s Gradgrind, a leading citizen and MP and education reformer. The Gradgrind children, Tom and Louisa, have both been trained according to Gradgrind’s modern educational methods. Bounderby is the manager of one of the factories in town, where Stephen Blackpool works as one of the factory “hands.” Finally, there’s Harthouse, an unscrupulous nobleman. The plot turns on several moments. Bounderby marries Louisa... Read more
In his The Invention of Christian Discourse, Vernon Robbins explains how and why Christian discourse and rhetoric diverged from classical models. Ryan Leif Hanson summarizes the argument in Silence and Praise: “Classical rhetoric understands the basic social reality of persons as based in the Graeco-Roman urban environment. In this context the three most important social locations are the law court, the political assembly, and the civil ceremony, which underlie the rhetorical practices of judicial (or forensic), deliberative (or symbouletic), and... Read more
Paul begins the substance of the letter to the Ephesians by “blessing” God (1:3). As is well known, in Greek, verses 3-14 form a single long sentence, with one verb, “Blessed” (v. 3). This reflects a form of Jewish prayer, called the Berekah. It is not a request for God to bless, but an act of worship, offering God praise, honor, and glory. Paul’s first large statement in Ephesians is an act of worship. He does not investigate the work... Read more
Joyce’s Ulysses has a pendulum structure. JH Raleigh (in an essay in Joyce’s Ulysses, 102) points out the contrast of filius and mater as these are the poles around which the action is organized: “solitary and single vs conjoined, both licitly and illicitly; homeless rover vs statonary huswife (husey); at large vs at rest; drunk vs sober; abstract vs concrete; rationalistic vs intuitive; subjective vs objective; intellectualistic vs materialistic; solipsistic vs pantheistic; guilt-obsessed vs self-forgiven; skeptical vs credulous; idealistic vs naturalistic; infidel/heretic/agnostic/atheist (it... Read more
In Psalm 80, the Psalmist is dismayed at Yahweh’s abandonment of His vine. Isaiah (Isaiah 5) laments but is not dismayed. He knows why the lover, his friend, has abandoned His vineyard-bride and now brings an indictment against her. What kind of grapes did Yahweh want? What kind of wine did He expect? Isaiah 5:7 tells us: Yahweh waited for justice and righteousness, but instead saw nothing but bloodshed and a cry of distress. Isaiah reinforces the dashed expectations with... Read more
Jeanne Halgren Kilde opens her When Church Became Theatre with a comparison of New Haven’s First Church of Christ (built 1814) with First Baptist of Minneapolis (built 1886). There had been a shift in the exterior, from “the classical pastiche of Greek and Roman to a medieval one with Gothic and Romanesque elements” (6). The more dramatic change was interior: “The rectangle of the Federalist church with its easily read longitudinal orientation had been replaced by a square room oriented diagonally... Read more
Marilynne Robinson is a theological anomaly. A self-confessed Calvinist, admirer of Calvin and Edwards, defender of original sin and predestination (which, she says right, is not determinism), she is also a self-described liberal Christian who tends to take predictably liberal positions on moral and political question and to use sneering phrases like “the Governor Jindals of the world” (Givenness of Things, 162). Liberal though her theology is, she can sock it to liberal theology. She argues that what she calls... Read more
“The bare fact is,” says Rowan Williams (The Edge of Words), “that the material world speaks.” Material agents speak, “and this speech is not . . . a chance decorative addition to mechanical process, but an activity that is implicated in the entire complex of finite agency. If the world is a coherent whole, speech is bound into that coherence” (123). This is true in several senses. Material objects “are always already ‘saturated’ with the workings of mind; we cannot... Read more
In an essay on “Reformation” in her recent collection, The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson observes that Latin remained culturally dominant in England even into the age of Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and Julian of Norwich. Latin’s hegemony “did have the advantage of making the learned classes mutually intelligible across the boundaries of nationality.” Yet this was at the cost of excluding “the great majority of people from participation in the most central concerns of their own civilization” (19). Contempt for the... Read more
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