My wish list for Catholics is terribly old-fashioned and terribly assertive. There’s hardly space here to defend my positions or thoroughly critique the Catholic position. So, this may end up sounding like a drive-by shooting or a childish tantrum. I trust that I can formulate my wish list with enough calmness that it doesn’t turn it into a bitch list. I want the Pope to give up his claim to infallibility. In our day, the Papacy stands as a global... Read more
One of the lesser-known movements discussed by Louis Newman in his Jewish Influence on Christian Reform Movements is the twelfth-century heresy initiated by Peter of Bruys and known as the Petrobrussian heresy. The Petrobrussians were similar to earlier and later movements in their rejection of infant baptism, their renunciation of holy places and their opposition to the Mass, their repudiation of tradition and much of the Old Testament. What is striking here is how heavily Catholic responses depended upon the Old... Read more
In a 2004 essay on global history, the late C.A. Bayly challenged the “fashionable emphasis on the wholly destructive effects of Western ‘colonialism.’ Famine, the disruption of local communities, the exacerbation of religious and racial tensions: these are all attributed to the Western impact as vigorously by contemporary cultural critics as by earlier socialist historians” (39). Bayly does not deny that “huge areas of land were expropriated from native peoples in the nineteenth century and that populations in parts of... Read more
What is conversion? There are different answers, argued Jerald Brauer in a 1978 essay on conversion in the Journal of Religion. He contrasts Puritan notions of conversion with those of later revivalist. Over several centuries, conversion was converted from a more corporate change to an individual experience, and from a sacramental to an a-sacramental experience. According to Brauer, Puritanism already represented as “subjectivizing” of the original Protestant notion of conversion. Puritanism attempted to maintain a “delicate balance” between “objective and... Read more
In his contribution to Reformation Readings of Paul, David C. Fink argues that Luther’s doctrine of justification was an effort to “grapple with the great commandment” to love God (45). Luther vehemently rejected the medieval notion that faith as the material cause had to be formed by love as the formal cause of justification. He saw it as a reversion to the notion that law had to form faith to make it alive, and he saw this as an effort to... Read more
According to J. Stuart Russell (The Parousia, 503), the Jewish War of the late 60s AD involved more than Palestine. Slaughter encompassed the empire, wherever Jews were: “Tacitus speaks of the bitter animosity with which the Arab auxiliaries of Titus were filled against the Jews, and we have a fearful proof of the intense hatred felt towards the Jews by the neighboring nations in the wholesale massacres of that unhappy people perpetrated in many cities just before the outbreak of... Read more
Paul Avis wrote Becoming a Bishop as a theological handbook for bishops, but much of the book has a wider application to all church leaders. His advice about handling conflicts in the church is judicious. His “first and most basic” piece of advice is “Don’t be afraid.” Fear can appear in various guises: It might tempt leaders to “smooth things over, to speak and act as thought there was not in fact a serious issue to be dealt with.” Fear can... Read more
“Put me like a seal on your heart, like a seal on your arm,” says the Bride in the Song of Songs (8:6). Seals mark something with the name of the owner. A letter is sealed as proof of its author (1 Kings 21:8). The high priest’s golden plate is engraved with the name of God like a seal, to mark the priest as one “holy to Yahweh.” Zerubbabel is placed “like a seal” as a mark that the kingdom... Read more
Stephen Turley (The Ritualized Revelation of the Messianic Age) doesn’t think standard treatments of Paul’s baptismal formula in Galatians 3 get the point. The standard options – ex opere operato and ex opere operantis – share the “common false assumption: they both place pistis and baptizein in a dichotomous relationship” (40). Turley brings the two dimensions together in part through the use of ritual theory. Citing Roy Rappaport, he refines ritualization as “that social strategy that overcomes uniquely the incommensurable metrics... Read more
In his contribution to Searching the Scriptures, Roger Aus examines Mark 14:25 (Jesus says, “I will never again drink the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God”). He takes its as a Nazirite vow to refrain from wine until His work is completed, but Aus takes an intriguingly circuitous route to get to that conclusion. He argues convincingly that there are strong parallels between the life of Joseph and the life... Read more
Leithart
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