In the first of his Hulsean lectures, Richard Hays claims (Reading Backwards) that “many ‘mainstream’ Protestant churches today are . . . naively Marcionite in their theology and practice: in their worship services they have no OT reading, or if the OT is read it is rarely preached upon. Judaism is regarded as a legalistic foil from which Jesus has delivered us” (5). This has “had a disastrous effect on the theological imagination of many Protestant churches, at least in... Read more
We often believe, Paul Griffiths writes (Decreation, 162-4) that eros is “a drive or appetite internal to itself by means of which it relates itself to a world external to itself.” Not so. “The flesh’s eros is received as git, not possessed as aspiration.” We become capable of caressing by being caressed, and “the lover becomes such only by receiving the gift of himself as beloved.” The kiss is paradigmatic: “Becoming one who kisses is dependent, causally (and indeed definitionally),... Read more
“Dominion” has a bad rap these days. The creation mandate to “have dominion, fill, subdue, and rule” the earth is regarded with suspicion: It gives human beings religious justification for environmental rapacity, domination of the other, sexism and racism. The Bible recognizes this possibility. The first king in Scripture is Lamech, who already carries out all the horrors of tyranny—multiplying wives, multiplying vengeance, multiplying taunts. Yet in Lamech’s dominion there is already a clue to another form of dominion. Lamech’s... Read more
Between Revelation 6:16-17, which speak of the “wrath of the Lamb” and “the great day of their wrath,” and 11:18, which says that the wrath came against the enraged nations, there is no reference to the wrath (orge) of God. As the seals come to a conclusion, the Lamb is on a rampage. Then wrath cools, and goes into hiding. Orge reappears after the two witnesses have been killed. The other word for wrath (thumos) doesn’t appear until 12:12 (the... Read more
Philip Jenkins’s contribution to The Globalization of Christianity (edited by Gordon Heath and Steven Studebaker) offers sobering and exciting news by turns. On the sobering side, he describes the statistical stagnation of Christianity, and compares it to the spread of Islam. For the past century, Christianity has held steady at 1/3 of the human population. It’s grown, of course, but it has not grown as a proportion of the world’s population. Islam has. “In 1900, the 200 to 220 million Muslims... Read more
A GPS can locate a human being. The “glowing blue dot on the Google-mapped smartphone” shows where your phone is. But, Paul Griffiths (Decreation) argues, these devices cannot locate human flesh. Such devices work only as they treat your flesh as “inanimate body,” which is not what it is (161-2). Our relation to place isn’t the same as the relation of inanimate things. It’s not “exclusively spatial” and cannot be accounted for by “specifying Cartesian coordinates of space.” Locatedness is,... Read more
The action of Revelation 12-15 moves from the sky to earth to the sea and then back up. In 11:19, the temple of God in heaven is opened, revealing the heavenly ark. Then there is a sign in heaven, in the firmament where the sun, moon, and stars are, the woman and the dragon, and a war in heaven follows. From that point, the focus moves down to earth, where the dragon attempts to kill the woman and then to drown... Read more
Scientists are human. They need to communicate with each other. For centuries, science has been an international, now a global, enterprise. How do scientists communicate? Once, French was, well, the lingua franca, so dominant in the discourses of high culture and science of the late 18th century that even the Prussian Academy spoke French (Michael Gordin, Scientific Babel, 16). Before that, it was Latin; after, for a while, it was German. Now English. Gordin’s forthcoming book traces the history of the... Read more
Over the centuries, readers have assumed that Revelation was written in, or predicting, a period of intense persecution. Irenaeus seems to say that Revelation was written in the reign of Domitian, and commentators have gone to lengths to show that Domitian fits the profile of the beast. Scholars today widely accept the conclusion that Domitian, during whose principate the book is supposed to have been written, did not intensify persecution or expand the imperial cult, as had long been believed.... Read more
Elijah’s life history tracks closely with that of Moses. When he appears on the scene, he curses Israel with drought, then flees the land (1 Kings 17). Like Moses after he killed the Egyptian, he goes out from his people and lives among Gentiles. (Elijah’s sojourn in Zarephath also linked with Joseph in Egypt: In both stories, a Hebrew prophet ensures that Gentiles have food during famine.) Then Elijah returns to the land to engage in a direct confrontation with... Read more
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