Conrad Rudolph’s The Mystic Ark is the product of impressive scholarship. Its focus is on the image of the mystic ark, a complex cosmic portrait showing “the Majesty” (looking like Jesus) enthroned, flanked by angels, holding a large disk, inscribed with a square turned sideways like a diamond. Inside the square is a diagram of Noah’s ark seen from above. Within the ark diagram the artist has depicted the six days of creation, a map of the world, the ages of... Read more
In his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, CS Lewis makes two deflationary comments about the effects of Renaissance humanism. First, “The ‘barbarous’ books [of medieval Latin] have survived in the only sense that really matters: they are used as their authors meant them to be used. It would be hard to think of a single text in humanists’ Latin except the Utopia, of which we can say the same. Petrarch’s Latin poetry, Politian, Buchanan, even sweet Sannazarus, even Erasmus... Read more
RW Southern (Making of the Middle Ages) sees a commonality between the romances of of the high middle ages and the theological and spiritual movements of the 11th-12th centuries. It’s a shift from an epic mentality to the thought-world of romance. Southern argues that this movement is evident in life as well as literature: “Briefly, we find less talk of life as an exercise in endurance, and of death in a hopeless cause; and we hear more of life as a... Read more
“The dead do not praise Yahweh, nor do any who do down into silence” (Psalm 115:17). It’s a refrain in the Psalms: Death marks the end of the life of praise. The dead cannot give thanks to God. Sheol isn’t just dark; it’s silent. But then Revelation comes along and we hear dead people praising God. Something’s happened to the dead. And that is, if not the whole point, a main point, of Revelation. The Father seeks worshipers, and Revelation... Read more
Teaching and learning never take place in no-place. They are always in an environment. The issue is always which environment and whether it is coherent with what is taught or at cross-purposes with content. Attention to the teaching environment may sound trendily modern, but it’s ancient wisdom. Deuteronomy 6 records Yahweh’s teaching to Israel to be teachers to their children. Yahweh’s teaching bridges the ontological gap between Creator and creature; the teaching that He teaches Israel to teach bridges the temporal... Read more
In his 2014 study of The Royalist Revolution, Eric Nelson presents the counter-intuitive case that the American revolutionaries were not revolting against monarchy but against a legislature: “It was, indeed, a rebellion in favor of royal power” (2). Nelson elaborates: “Colonial whigs who had long been ‘slumbering under the old prejudices in favour of Parliamentary power’ suddenly found themselves confronted in the 1760s and 1770s with a parliament that claimed the right to legislate for them ‘in all cases whatsoever.’ Those... Read more
For medievals, allegory wasn’t simply a way of dealing with texts or a method of writing. It was science, a mode of understanding of the world as a whole. The world was a forest of symbols and allegories from which moral and theological lessons might be drawn. The great medieval bestiaries are full of allegorical expositions of the flora and fauna, real and imagined, of the world. -Curtius (European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 538-40) includes an appendix on... Read more
Prophets always initiate new covenants. They end one set of covenantal arrangements and bring in new ones. They are the hinges of history. Noah is a prophet who becomes an Adam in a new creation covenant. Abraham is the first man called a prophet, and is the recipient of covenant promises. Moses is a prophet who is the mediator of the Sinai covenant. As the Sinai covenant collapses, Samuel brings it to an end and initiates the Davidic covenant. Within... Read more
Psalm 105:36 describes the exodus as the Lord’s striking of the “firstborn” of Egypt, “the firstfuits of all their vigor.” Firstborn is firstfruits: It makes obvious sense. And behind the obvious is a link between human and humus, between the fruitfulness of earth and the fruitfulness of the human race. A woman is the earth-mother in which a man plants seed, and the result is fresh growth. A woman who bears fruit from the seed of a man might even... Read more
“Touch not my anointed, and do my prophets no harm.” That is how Psalm 105:15 summarizes the Lord’s care of the patriarchs who were wanderers and strangers in the earth. “He permitted no many to oppress them, and he reproved kings for their sake” (v. 14, alluding to Genesis 12 and 20). Many of the “touch not” restrictions in the Torah apply not to persons but to objects. When Moses sets up the tabernacle, he anoints the altar of ascensions,... Read more
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