The Supper is bread, food for life. The Supper is also wine, a sign of rest and completion, a sign of our inclusion in a new covenant, when priests can drink wine in the presence of God. Why wine? Because Jesus is the true Dionysus, the true God of the vine. The Dionysus of the Greeks offered only wine of death. Mad with the wine of Dionysus, the women of Thebes tore king Pentheus limb from limb, and Pentheus’ mother... Read more
“Entrainment,” writes Joshua Leeds, “concerns changing the rate of brain waves, breaths, or heard-beats from one speed to another” (40). Our bodies beat to certain rhythms, and these rhythms fall into sync with one another. When an external vibration hits our bodies, it affects our internal rhythms: “individually, we entrain to . . . ocean waves, music, the periodic sounds of machines, or electromagnetic frequently fields” (44). It works internal-to-internal, and external-to-internal. With regard to the first, “our pulse systems... Read more
A fair bit of scholarship has been devoted recently to exploring the uses of Scripture in Revelation. This can have different focal points and effects on the reading. I am relying on Steve Moyise’s contribution to Hays and Alkier’s Revelation and the Politics of Apocalyptic Interpretation. In his commentary, GB Caird highlighted the “rebirth of images” (Austin Farrer’s phase) that occurs in John’s use of Old Testament sources. Revelation 5:5-6 is the paradigm case: John hears that the lion of Judah... Read more
Our head is the governing part of our body. We think in our brains, and our brains send signals through the nervous system to the rest of our bodies. It’s no accident that “head” is an ancient and still current symbol of authority and rule: Head coach, Head of School, Head chef, heading up the investigation. But it’s rather arresting to notice that our heads are among the most porous parts of our body, with intake points for sights, sounds,... Read more
Evangelicals generally classify interpretations of Revelation as futurist, historicist, idealist, or preterist. For futurists, the book of Revelation describes the events leading up to the end of the space-time universe, the final coming of Jesus. Futurist interpretations need not be pre-millennial, but they often are. Historicist read Revelation as an allegory of the history of the church. This was popular among Reformers, who identified the Catholic Church with the false bride, the whore Babylon. Idealist claim that the book is... Read more
At the center of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches about three duties of Jewish piety – alms, prayer, and fasting. Regarding the last, He says, “when you fast, do not put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites, for they render their faces unrecognizable in order to be seen fasting by men. . . . But you, when you fast, anoint your head, and wash your face, so that you may not be seen fasting by men, but... Read more
I previously commented on RJ Snell’s The Perspective of Love, which offers “natural law in a new mode.” Snell was recently interviewed by Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio, and the interviewed revealed an important feature of Snell’s natural law theory – its formalism. Snell emphasized that natural law is a “performance” that has to do with practical reason, and specifically with the structure of practical reason. Everyone makes decisions and acts for the sake of some good. They can... Read more
Atonement theories abound. Christus Victor says Jesus triumphed over Satan; sacrificial theories say that Jesus offered Himself as a vicarious sacrifice; recently, a number of theologians have emphasized the corporate, ecclesial dimensions of the atonement. All true. We don’t need to choose among them. Revelation 12:11 makes that plain: “They overcame [the dragon] because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their witness.” It’s all there: Victory over Satan (“overcame” the dragon); sacrifice (“blood of... Read more
Commentators have used social scientific theories and models to try to explicate the social setting of biblical books and their authors. Bruce Malina has been a leading figure in applying these models to Revelation. We can get the general idea from his Social Science Commentary on Revelation, co-authored with John Pilch. Social context gives us some hermeneutical guidelines for thinking about how to read an ancient text. The authors claim in the introduction that “the New Testament was written in what anthropologists... Read more
William Viestenz’s By the Grace of God joins a growing list of books that, invoking Carl Schmitt and others, argues that secular politics has never been secular, but always parasitic on sacred politics. Viestenz’s book is not an exercise in theory, however, but a theoretically-attentive historical study of the Spain of Franco. He finds religious motifs everywhere in the Francoist regime. Franco “consolidat[ed] sovereignty and project[ed] national identity through sacred imaging” and so turned to “purifying, exclusionary violence” against “the ever-present... Read more
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