This is a gloss and summary of the overview I offer in my Brazos commentary on 1-2 Kings. Though the book is detailed and sometimes convoluted, the overall shape is neatly symmetrical. A. David and Solomon found the United Kingdom; Solomon builds a house. B. Jeroboam founds the Northern Kingdom; he builds shrines for golden calves. C. Omri founds a dynasty in the Northern Kingdom; he builds a capital, and his son Ahab builds houses for Baal. This a descent into... Read more
How many Protestants are comfortable applying the label “righteous” to themselves? How many Protestants can sing or pray the Psalms with a clean conscience, appealing to the Lord to accept them because of their righteousness? How many Protestants instead experience an instinctive mental reservation when they speak of their justification? “Of course, I’m still a sinner” comes immediately to our minds and lips. Ultimately, that instinct is unbelief, a failure or refusal to take God at His gracious word. But... Read more
God set Jesus forth as a “hilasterion in His blood” in order to achieve redemption (Romans 3:25). Theodore Jennings (Outlaw Justice, 66), insistent on reading Paul politically, can’t quite make sense of this: “The text connects loyalty to blood. And this is exactly what a reader of Paul might expect, since elsewhere Paul has said that the messiah has ‘become obedient to death, even death on a cross’ (Philippians 2:8). Obedience and faithfulness are quite strongly connected in Paul. .... Read more
Mark Greif’s The Age of the Crisis of Man exhumes a neglected thread of American intellectual history, a period from the early 30s to the early 70s when the “crisis of man” was on everyone’s mind. Though an intellectual history, Greif attends as much to novelists as to philosophers, arguing plausibly that ideas are often transmitted to popular consciousness by artistic media. Every term of that phrase is important to Greif. The notion that there was a crisis – not only... Read more
As she has traveled in the US to promote Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi has heard a lot about the dismal state of reading in America. She wasn’t convinced, and begins her new book, The Republic of Imagination, with a defense of the American reader: “The majority of people in this country who haunt bookstores, go to readings and book festivals or simply read in the privacy of their homes are not traumatized exiles. Many have seldom left their hometown or... Read more
The army revealed by the sixth seal (Revelation 9:13-21) wears breastplates of “fire, hyacinth, and brimstone” (v. 17a) and breathes out “fire, smoke, and brimstone” (v. 17b), with which it kills a third of humanity (v. 18). Hyacinth is an anomaly on the first list, but essentially the army wears the same thing is speaks, and its speech are its weapons. They are clothed in what they speak, and they speak what they wear. Fire, smoke, and brimstone conjure up... Read more
Sociologists want to present themselves as objective scientists of the social order, but when Christian Smith looks at his disciple he doesn’t see science. He sees the Sacred Project of American Sociology, sociology constituted as a project that he is even willing to describe as “spiritual.” He applies a “sociology of religion” to the discipline of American sociology itself. He is careful to define his terms. “Sacred” and “spiritual” don’t necessarily connote belief in religious doctrines or spiritual beings. Sacred refers... Read more
John is commissioned to write to the seven churches of Asia (Revelation 1). He’s commissioned again as a prophet to prophesy (chapter 10).The reason is that his portfolio expands. He initially writes to the churches, and his visions have to do with the “land.” His second commission is to be prophet to “peoples, nations, tongues, king” (10:11). It’s not the first time this happens. Elijah is re-commissioned when the dramatic show-down on Mount Carmel doesn’t stick (1 Kings 18-19). And when... Read more
A strong angel hands John a book, not to read but to eat (Revelation 10). The instructions and John’s compliance (vv. 9b-11) are chiastically structured: a. He said, Take and eat. b. It will make your stomach bitter c. but in your mouth it will be sweet as honey. a’/d. And I took the book from the angel’s hand and ate it. c’. And it was in my mouth as sweet as honey b’. and when I ate it, my... Read more
“Gifts,” writes John Barclay (Galatians and Christian Theology, 307), “typically express and reinforce a preexistent system of values.” Gifts are given to the deserving, and signify their merit. According to Paul, God’s gift of Christ is given to the undeserving, and that “dangerous and unsettling” gift (308) upends social conventions and expectations. It requires a quite different social practice, one that is not dominated by the rivalries of the flesh – of ethnicity, status, or gender – but a community... Read more
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