Love has power to transform the world and lovers. “Love is the answer to the despair in which a reality is lost that knows nothing other than law, fate, and will” (74). Rosenstock-Huessy makes this claim in his Sociology, but he’s not being gauzily sentimental. Love takes public form in marriage, and the wedding day is a triumph over law, fate and will.” How so? “Every wedding breaks the prevailing law: it sanctions the change of a name. The freedom... Read more
What did the fathers who formulated the Nicene Creed mean to assert when they described the relationship between Father and Son with the term homoouios, “same substance”? In what sense “substance” and in what sense “same”? Surveying the usage of this terminology before Nicea, Christopher Stead (Divine Substance) suggests several possibilities. First, homoousios might mean “that the so-called two or more things are actually one and the same; the reference to ‘substance’ merely advises us that in calling them ‘two’... Read more
Through the administration of the mystery, the manifold wisdom of God is made know through the church to rulers and authorities in the heavenly places (Ephesians 3:9-10). The “mystery” is something hidden in God for ages past and now revealed in Christ. In Ephesians, the mystery is the union of Jews and Gentiles in the one body of Jesus, that Gentiles are “fellow heirs and fellow members of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise” (3:4-6). How is this... Read more
Public discourse, it is often argued, has to be conducted in common language, and religious language isn’t common. Religion has to be left in the “vestibule.” Where does that perception come from? asks Charles Taylor. Taylor traces it to an epistemological distinction: “There is secular reason, which everyone can use and reach conclusions by—conclusions that is, with which everyone can agree. Then there are special languages, which introduce extra assumptions, which might even contradict those of ordinary secular reason. These... Read more
Stephen Holmes (Quest for the Trinity) summarizes Gregory of Nyssa’s response to Eunomius’s use of divine names: “Gregory is scathing about Eunomius’s assumption that the divine essence can be adequately named. His arguments on this point are often unsatisfactory, turning regularly on the assumption that the same divine names apply to the Son as to the Father, which is rather the point to be proved, but within it all he is offering a distinctively different account of how God is... Read more
Lenn Goodman’s essay in Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State presents a devastating critique of Rawlsian political liberalism. The fundamental issue, Goodman claims, is that Rawls treats individual decisions as public acts, and therefore believes that liberalism needs to curtail the influence of ideologies even in the voting booth (27). For Rawls, this conflating of individual and public acts “rests on the recognition that in democracies it is no longer the monarch, but we who are the state. Indeed, Mill’s... Read more
Psalm 22 provides much of the background for the crucifixion of Jesus. It begins with “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me,” the words of Jesus from the cross. “Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not hear. And in the night season, and season, and am not silent.” David doesn’t stay in that state of isolation, fear, distance,... Read more
Evangelicals need to thicken our theology of the Lord’s Supper, first by drawing more of the Bible into the discussion of the Supper, and second by drawing more of the Supper into discussion of the Supper. Even a fine recent treatment of Reformed sacramental theology, Todd Billings’s Remembrance, Communion, and Hope, is still too thin on both counts. Billings does discuss the key New Testament passages—the institution narratives, Jesus’ resurrection meals, 1 Corinthians 10-11—and makes passing references to Passover and... Read more
The Passion Narrative is about Jesus’ arrest, trial, and death; it’s about the Son of Man being “delivered up.” But there’s a lot more going on. The story is actually woven of several distinct stories. Two other characters are introduced in Matthew 26 – the woman who anoints Jesus and the Twelve. This is not the last time we’ll see women, nor the last time we see the Twelve. The disciples and a woman are central to the story in... Read more
After the Olivet Discourse, Jesus “finished all these words.” Matthew has used a similar phrase before (26:1; cf. 7:28; 11:1; 13:53; 19:1). Throughout the book, in fact, each time that Jesus finishes a long section of teaching, Matthew tells us that Jesus “finished these words.” That refrain doesn’t just tell us that the discourse is over. We know the discourse is over because the red lettering stops, or the quotation marks end, or in the original Greek simply because Matthew... Read more
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