“Love is as strong as death, and jealousy as Sheol.” A fine sentiment, but what does it mean? Maybe it means that love is as inevitable as death. We’re all going to die; our last resting place in this creation is the grave. Perhaps Solomon says that love is inevitable in the way death is. But is it? Many go through life longing for love, hoping for love, feeling brief stirrings of love and receiving brief affection in return, but... Read more
Solomon built the temple on the threshing floor that David bought from Araunah the Jebusite (2 Samuel 24; 2 Chronicles 3). What might that mean? Grain is threshed when an animal walks over it, sometimes dragging a threshing sledge, to separate the grain from the chaff. Threshed grain is winnowed, thrown into the air in an open place, so that the wind can carry the chaff away. Worship is like that? Yes. We are God’s field, God’s planting. We are... Read more
Psalm 136 is a dialogic Psalm in which the second line of each verse is the same: “For His lovingkindness is everlasting.” The God of lovingkindness is the God of gods and Lord of lords. He is the Creator of sun, moon, stars, sea, and sky. He delivered Israel from Egypt, defeated kings like Sihon and giants like Og of Bashan and gave their land to Israel. He continues to remember and rescue His people. The Psalm ends with: “Who... Read more
Hal Foster’s Bad New Days is an assessment of the past twenty-five years of European and American art. Foster organizes his treatment under five themes – Abject, Archival, Mimetic, Precarious, and Post-Critical? One will notice that “beauty” is absent. Today’s avant garde makes Francis Bacon look tame. One of Foster’s themes is the recoil from post-structuralist representationalism and a return to the real, but the real is a horrifying one. Of Cindy Sherman’s photographs and assemblages (“a young woman with a... Read more
Early in Revelation, the Father is described as the one who “is and who was and who comes” (Revelation 1:4). 1:8 suggests that the Trinity might be described in the same way. The Trinity is not a God immune to time; the eternality of the Trinity is the eternality of one who embraces all time, who is and who was and who comes; the God who is before every beginning, who is present in each present, who has always already... Read more
The quadriga – the fourfold sense, consisting of literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical – isn’t only a “method” for interpreting Scripture but a framework for interpreting everything. Two assumptions guide my reflections here. First, medieval biblical scholars insisted that biblical allegory and typology was not merely a method of textual interpretation but was a way of discerning the rhythms and rhymes of history. To say David’s life is an allegorical type of Christ’s life is not merely to say that... Read more
AC Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy) points out that Othello has an unusual structure for a Shakespeare tragedy. The main conflict doesn’t arise until the third act, and then the pressure and movement is relentless from that point to the end. In the other tragedies, the crisis emerges earlier, Act 4 is more relaxed, before the crescendo at the end. One effect of this unusual structure is to throw the subplot of Iago and Roderigo into prominence in the first two acts.... Read more
Jesus’ action in the temple was a symbolic enactment of the coming destruction of the temple. The Jewish leaders had turned what should have been a house of prayer for the Gentiles into a den of brigands. Jesus overturned the tables and chairs to dramatize what lay on the horizon for the temple authorities. He interrupted the sacrificial operations of the temple in part and temporarily; soon, the temple’s sacrifices would be ended completely and forever. Jesus overturns the seats... Read more
These are remarks delivered to introduce conductor John Mason Hodges as the first Birmingham Life and Culture speaker. This is the first of what we hope will be an annual lecture on the arts and culture. Each year, we’ll bring a painter, musician, poet, sculptor, novelist, critic, architect, or scholar to Birmingham to teach us what it means to engage the arts and culture Christianly. We all know our culture is decadent, if not deranged. As Christians, we cannot be... Read more
Robert Jenson grasps the attractions of antinomianism: “perhaps only on the edge of antinomianism does the true bite of the gospel appear” (Ezekiel, 62). Yet Christians must stop short of the edge, because “falling over that edge is . . . the disaster of faith.” This is not because we need to balance God’s gracious, loving choice with the demands of God’s law. Rather, love requires the imposition of statutes and ordinances. A lawless love is “a mere oxymoron” (62).... Read more
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