The dead have gone missing from the realm of the living,” observes Candi Cann in Virtual Afterlives (xi). “They are, like their memorials, repackaged, the very disjuncture of death denies in its most crucial moment.” Death has moved from the home and family to the hospital and the funeral home. “Death and dying, with rare exceptions, have become compartmentalized from everyday life, and death and dying are a business” (2). She sees this effort to displace the dead from the realm... Read more
The Incarnation of God by John Clark and Marcus Peter Johnson is an excellent book. This accessible book offers a mini-systematics from the perspective of the incarnation, showing how the incarnation affects our understanding of God and His attributes, atonement and salvation, church and sacraments. They end with a chapter examining the import of the incarnation for sexual ethics. The theology they present is systematically coherent, moving from Trinity to incarnation to salvation as incorporation into the Son and the Triune... Read more
We die to sin in baptism, Paul says. Liberated from sin, we are to devote the members of our bodies to God and His righteousness. We already participate in Jesus’ resurrection; His resurrection power is already at work in our bodies (Romans 6). What might that mean? What does it look like to present the members of our body as instruments of righteousness? Psalm 15 gives some hints. Our feet walk perfectly (v. 3) and our hands work righteousness (v.... Read more
Human beings are made in the image of the giving God, and this suggests that giving, reception, and return are part of the cycle of human existence as well. Man is created as a recipient of gifts; Adam’s very existence is a gift that God is not constrained to give, a gift that does not meet any lack in God’s being. Man is fundamentally a recipient – “what do you have that you did not receive?” But the radical... Read more
God Himself is a Giver of Gifts. His eternal life is a life of give and counter-gift. Our God is the giving God. We can start with James 1:5, 17. Verse 17 tells us that every good thing and every gift is ultimately from God, who gives relentlessly, without reproaching us, both to the good and evil, the grateful and the ungrateful. There is no variation in the Father of lights who gives without reproach. Whatever things you have you... Read more
In a TLS review of several recent books on fairy tales, Fracesca Wade points to the political context and economic setting of early folk and fairy tale collections. Inspired by Herder, the Grimms, she observes, intended to recover Germanitas by study of natural German poetry: “Although the brothers drew widely on international literary sources – Perrault, Gianfrancesco Straparola, Madame d’Aulnoy – the bulk of the book was composed of oral tales collected from contributors in and around Kassel. Dorothea Viehmann, who... Read more
The oracle of judgment in Ezekiel 14:12-23 is structured as a fourfold judgment: sword, famine, beasts, plague (v. 21). The descriptions of judgment are laid out in four paragraphs that use repetitive, stereotyped language. Throughout, Yahweh says that even the intercession of Noah, Daniel, and Job could not rescue Judah from destruction. Their righteousness would rescue them individually, but no one else: No ark with 8 persons. In the first and last paragraphs, these three righteous men are explicitly named... Read more
Israel is a vine, transplanted from Egypt (Psalm 80; Isaiah 5). She exists to produce wine that gladdens the hearts of men. Israel is the Dionysian people. Ezekiel brings out another dimension of the vine image: “Son of man, how is the wood of the vine better than any wood of a branch that is among the trees of the forest? Can wood be taken from it to make anything, or can men take a peg from it on which... Read more
Jesus prayed that the church’s unity would reflect the unity of the Father and Son. Paul urged the Ephesians to cultivate the virtues of peace that would express the sevenfold unity of the church (Ephesians 4). That demand is a perennial one. But we’ve been divided for a long time. Even if unity is a demand of the gospel, is it an urgent demand today? Don’t we have other, perhaps bigger, fish to fry? Why now? I doubt there are... Read more
In his introduction to Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology, Joshua Davis traces the travail of modern theology to Kant: “Seated at the heart of modern theology, and especially of modern Protestant theology, is the existing and still unresolved problem of the relation between knowledge (Wissen) and belief (Glaube). Immanual Kant’s dualistic configuration of that relation is responsible for causing this problem” (6). Various efforts have been made to overcome this dualism, but many have remained within its grip. The rise... Read more
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