Every spring, basketball takes over my life for several weeks. I still function: I continue to do those things I tell my kids constitutes my “work.” I eat, sleep, talk, teach, write. But for a few weeks baseketball is my life. A Brazilian friend went through something similar recently – something about another game that uses a round ball, a net, and requires quick footwork. If you asked me, even during an NBA finals game, “Is basketball really that important,”... Read more
Robert Jenson is a profound theologian. He is also a spritely essayist. The essay may in fact be his genre of choice. Cascade has just released a compilation of these essays under the Jensonian title, Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics. Most of the essays are fairly recent, but it’s rather shocking to discover a couple of pieces from the early 1960s (remember the 1900s, kids?), and to realize just how long Jenson has been about this game. There are cultural essays, some... Read more
An angel with a stamp comes from the rising sun, ready to mark the foreheads of 144,000 of God’s bondservants (Revelation 7:3). That’s just the spot where Aaron and the other high priests were marked: “Holy to Yahweh” was engraved on the golden blossom at the front of the priest’s turban (Exodus 28:36-38). Stamped on the forehead, the 144,000 are made priests. The next time we see them, they are standing on Zion singing a new song and playing harps... Read more
The distinction between sacred and profane is said to be a universal religious structure, but it’s remarkably rare in the Hebrew Bible. Holy things are “profaned” with some frequency (e.g., Exodus 31:14, on profaning the Sabbath) but “profane” as a noun describing a space is use only a handful of times. Ezekiel condemns the priests for failing to make division between the holy and profane (Ezekiel 22:26), and the massive walls of his visionary temple run between the zones of... Read more
At Politico, Nick Spencer argues that the possibility of atheism in the modern world, and the relative weakness of atheism in America, has less to do with science than with politics. Spencer writes, “‘Science’ – if we can treat that collection of disparate disciplines as one single, coherent enterprise – did have something to do with the growth of atheism in the West, but very much less than most imagine. Those three great moments of scientific progress – the Copernican revolution... Read more
Everyone knows, as Eric Jaffe puts it, that “Outside views are often badges of seniority or achievement in the work world—understandably, given that they’re in short supply.” A new study suggests that there’s more at stake, though: “an interdisciplinary team of architects and medical researchers . . . recently conducted a small case study comparing people exposed to natural light at their jobs with those who aren’t.” They discovered that “the window workers scored better on common self-report health and sleep... Read more
In an appendix to Fullness Received and Returned (390), Seng-Kong Tan summarizes Paul Negrut’s arguments against the notion of divine energies developed by Gregory of Palamas. First, “while the energies are enhypostatic and only express but are not identical to the divine persons, it follows that ‘the latter is forced to occupy a kind of intermediate level between the essence and energies.’” The effect is to put distance between “theologia and oikonomia.” Second, “by asserting that the ousia is totally impenetrable... Read more
When the second creature calls out, a red horse emerges from the opened heaven, with a rider who receives the ability to remove peace, to set men against each other, using a “great sword” (machaira megale, Revelation 6:4). Only a few “great swords” appear elsewhere in Scripture. Yahweh promises that He will punish Leviathan the fleeing and twisting serpent, the dragon of the sea, with his “fierce and great and mighty sword” (Isaiah 27:1; Heb. charebo . . . haggedolah;... Read more
Exodus includes two descriptions of the furnishings of the tabernacle, one before the golden calf incident (25-31) and one after (35-40). Exodus 39:32-43 provides the conclusion to a section describing the construction of the tabernacle and furnishings, which is followed by the actual erection of the tabernacle in chapter 40. That conclusion passage in chapter 39 is a new-creation passage. The numerous specific features of the tabernacle are listed under seven major headings: 1. Tent and coverings (with furnishings, clasps,... Read more
Walter Lowe’s contribution to the Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology is a brief not for particularity but for the postmodern recovery of singularity after the collapse of Enlightenment universalism. Lowe argues, “Nothing dictates that truth, elusive as it is, cannot possibly be revealed in, and linked to, a speci?c singularity; a speci?c event.To paraphrase a bit of folk wisdom, God must love singularity, to have created so much of it. And what God has created, we are called to protect. But... Read more
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