NT Wright has insisted over the years that the apocalyptic language of the gospels (Matthew 24; Mark 13; Luke 21) doesn’t refer to the end of the space-time universe but to the end of a socio-political order. Edward Adams dissents in his 2007 The Stars Will Fall From Heaven. Wright claim that Jesus uses conventional prophetic language that would have been well understood by His hearers, citing Isaiah 13 and 34 in support. Wright then argues that later apocalyptic writers use... Read more
John’s account of the resurrection fulfills the promise of his prologue (John 20). Here is the Word made flesh, dead and buried, now risen as new Adam, the “gardener,” with Mary Magdalene, a type of the new Eve. The Word who spoke the worlds into being speaks also after death, saying “Woman! Mary!” And later, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” It seems a fitting end, but it’s not quite an end. It’s more a beginning. Yahweh created Adam, placed Him in... Read more
Elijah’s life (1 Kings 17-19) tracks that of Moses. He confronts the Pharaoh-like King Ahab, then flees from the land, as Moses fled to Midian, where he is cared for by a widow. God provides miraculously for the prophet and his host, but then her child dies. In the Moses story, this corresponds to the threat to the son of Moses, Gershom, who nearly dies at the border of Egypt as Moses returns. Gershom is saved by circumcision, but Elijah... Read more
A wondrous passage from Donne: “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that... Read more
Paul Griffiths’s Decreation has some harrowing passages about sin. Like this one: “What will be left of me when I am no longer a sinner? That is a question fundamental to trembling before hell’s presence in the devastation [i.e., the fallen world]. Such trembling, however, like all well-formed Christian responses, can undergo malformation, and the most common malformation of trembling is despair, and its concomitant, scrupulosity. Those who despair of avoiding hell typically do so because they seem to themselves to... Read more
At the beginning of his Silence and Praise, Ryan Hansen summarizes several of the recent approaches to understanding the cosmology of the book of Revelation. The most popular today borrows from the sociology of knowledge to suggest that John’s writing creates a “symbolic universe” or “worldview” for his readers. Hansen rightly argues that “the symbolic universe solution cannot account for the sense in John’s text that he does seem to want to say something true about material reality. His language strains... Read more
Drawing on the work of Oliver O’Donovan, Jamie Smith offers a critique of natural law as an adequate grounding for political theology. Positively, Smith argues that “he public task of the church is not just to remind the world of what it (allegedly) already knows (by ‘natural’ reason), but to proclaim what it couldn’t otherwise know—and to do so as a public service for the sake of the common good.” The issue is not ontological but epistemological. Smith notes that “O’Donovan... Read more
Thomas considers acedia, “sloth,” as the opposite of delight. It is “sadness directed toward what ought to yield delight” (summary by Paul Griffiths, Decreation, 196). Paul Griffiths glosses: Acedia “is the mark of those sufficiently habituated to looking at nothing that when they look at something—and most especially at the LORD, the supreme object of delight—they can only sigh, shake their heads, and close their eyes. Acedia’s sadness is not pain, exactly; it is not intense enough for that. Neither is... Read more
Explaining the power of liturgical habit, Paul Griffiths (Decreation) offers writing as an example of the self-forgetful, and world-forgetful, character of habit. It’s one of the best descriptions of the experience of writing that I have come across. A few preliminaries to make sense of the analysis: Griffiths makes use of the phenomenological concept of qualia, “mental entities” that are differentiated from one another by their “phenomenal properties” but also by “the subject to whom or for whom they appear”... Read more
Douglas Rushkoff’s Nothing Sacred is rather all over the place (as one might say if one had a thickly superior British accent). The Judaism he favors isn’t a “traditional community with concrete values and well-defined rules” (1) but one that “stresses transparency, open-ended inquiry, assimilation of the foreign, and a commitment to conscious living.” Above all, Rushkoff argues, “it invites inquire and change. It is a tradition born out of revolution, committed to evolution, and always wiling to undergo renaissance at... Read more
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