Timothy Carson thinks the number one is a “giddy” number, “delighted in its unity, ecstatic about its own irreducible, undivided self” (The Square Root of God, 10). It has good reason to be giddy. It is “always a component of, a part of everything else, no matter how complex it gets.” That’s a neat gig: “You are totally complete in and of yourself, yet at the same time related to everything else, making everything else possible.” It’s the factor that... Read more
Douglas Oakman’s Jesus, Debt, and the Lord’s Prayer spends an inordinate amount of space on source-critical questions concerning the Lord’s prayer. His claim that “Jesus was attempting to mitigate the situation of the indebted (‘sinner’) by promoting the subversion of the imperial tax system in Galilee” (100) is unconvincing. His claim that “Jesus’ historical activity was essentially about politics, and the restructuring of society, and not about religion or theology” (117) implies the very dualism that he seems intent on overcoming.... Read more
In his recent Zero to One, Peter Thiel sets out a neat typology of philosophy, politics, and cultural attitudes based on differing stances toward the future. He distinguishes optimists and pessimists, and subdivides each into “definite” and “indefinite.” Optimists and pessimists are obvious: One is bullish about the future, the other ursine. The interest of the typology is in the other distinction: Definites think they have some capacity to control the future, Indefinites don’t. So, a definite optimist plans and works... Read more
Paul reminds the Corinthians that those who served the altar shared in the proceeds of the altar, and applies that model to the church’s responsibility to support minsters of the gospel. That means that the Levitical system of paying priests (cf. Leviticus 7–8; Numbers 18) provides a model for Christian churches. It’s not a direct model, but we can draw some general conclusions at least. From the data in the Torah, we can see that the Levitical priests were well... Read more
The opening verses of Proverbs describe the aims of wisdom, its purposes and gifts. The same verses also point to the source of wisdom: Where is skill in living well to be found? Where do we get training and instruction in this art? Ultimately, wisdom has its source in Yahweh. The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of wisdom, and the Lady Wisdom that Solomon comments was there with the Creator at the creation (Proverbs 8). But Proverbs also points... Read more
God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all, John tells us. What might that mean? God is an eternal fellowship of light, eternal source, eternal radiance, and eternal dispersion that illumines the source and radiance. Light gives life. Nothing can live without light. To say that God is light is to say that He gives life to everything. If God is eternal light, then God is eternal life. God cannot live without light, because God cannot live... Read more
Jesus begins the sermon on the mount with the Beatitudes, which are phrased in third person: Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the kingdom; blessed are those . . . , for they. That continues through verse 10. Then Jesus basically repeats verse 10, but with a grammatical shift. “Blessed are those who have been persecuted” becomes “blessed are you when men cast insults at you, and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you... Read more
Mark Kulansky observes in his Salt: A World History that “Almost no place on earth is without salt. But this was not clear until revealed by modern geology, and so for all of history until the twentieth century, salt was desperately searched for, traded for, and fought over.” Salt’s importance declined with the invention of canning and refrigeration. Before the fairly recent past, though, salt was one of the commodities that shaped the world we live in. People wanted and knew they... Read more
When Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount, He is sitting on a mountain teaching about the law. He is a new Moses; He is Yahweh. To get the full force of the analogy, we should recalled that God reveals more on Sinai than the Ten Word or moral commandments. Yahweh gives the Ten Words and the Book of the Covenant, but then He also gives lengthy instructions about the tabernacle. Jesus is giving moral instructions, telling His disciples how... Read more
How, Walter Rauschenbush asked in his Theology for a Social Gospel, does Jesus bear our sins? Unsatisfied with “imputation” as an explanation, he turned to a “social” explanation. Jesus was in solidarity with humanity, and human history is a history of sin. Humanity is bound in a enslaving network of social sin: “this race life of ours is pervaded by sin; not only by sporadic acts of folly, waywardness, vice or crime which spring spontaneously from human life, but by organized forces and institutions... Read more
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