In an appreciative response to Bruce Marshall’s piece on Hegelian Trinitarian theology, Paul Molnar questions whether, as Marshall argues, we cannot affirm that the Son is abandoned by the Father without concluding that the Son has ceased to be God. Molnar writes, “The Father and Spirit remained one in being with the Son who became incarnate and experienced humiliation and death in order to reconcile the world from both the divine and the human sides. The issue here is this:... Read more
In an essay in a recent issue of Pro Ecclesia, Bruce Marshall observes that traditional Christological formulas no longer do the work they were designed to do in Hegelianized contemporary Trinitarian theology. Two sets of Christological distinctions are relevant. On the one hand, there is the creedal distinction between the divine and human natures and, on the other, a distinction between what is belongs to the incarnate Son in propria persona and what belongs to him in persona nostra. These... Read more
Isaiah 66:3-17 is organized in a modified chiasm: A. Fourfold abominations, 3 (“blood of swine”). B. Punishment of enemies, 4-6 (begins with “hear the word of Yahweh”). C. Zion gives birth, 7-9 (“says your God” at end). D. Jerusalem’s joy, 10-11. E. Peace like a river, 12a (begins with “thus says Yahweh”) C’. Comforted like a child with mother, 12b-13. D’. Joy, 14a. B’. Indignation toward enemies, 14b-16 A’. Abominations, 17 (“swine’s flesh”; ends with “declares Yahweh”). This moves from... Read more
Martin Bernal (Black Athena, 1.128) points out the novelty of Christian association with the sign of the fish, which had no purchase in the Old Testament: “Key disciples were fishermen, and fishing images abound. There is the miracle of the two fishes and the five loaves of bread. Even more strikingly, in the Gospel according to St John, Christ gave his disciples fish in a symbolic last meal. This theme, and the idea that fish were central to the Last... Read more
Isaiah 66:6 would make a neat movie scene. First we hear a voice of tumult, a voice like the roaring of the sea or like the din of a gigantic party. It’s coming from the city, but the camera keeps moving to focus on the temple (heykal, “palace,” used of Yahweh’s temple-palace), which is where the sound is coming from. But then the camera moves into the temple and we realize that the din we’ve heard is the voice of... Read more
Isaiah 66 begins with an obvious allusion to this prayer. Yahweh claims to sit enthroned in heaven and use earth as His footstool (v. 1), and adds that, gargantuan as He is, He is uncontainable by any house that Israel might make for Him (v. 1). Solomon already knew this: “Behold heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain Thee, how much less this house which I have built” (1 Kings 8:27). If the house cannot contain Yahweh, at least it... Read more
Jonathan Crary begins his 24/7 describing experiments to increase the time that soldiers can stay awake and alert. 24/7 has been around for a long time.So far, humans have resisted, simply by getting tired. Now we’re trying to create humans who can flourish, or at least survive, in the unnatural world we’ve made. Sleep is for Crary the final frontier of late capitalism, the last bastion of acceptable inefficiency. Before dismissing this as quasi-Marxist, listen to Crary’s familiar description of our world:... Read more
According to Egyptian mythology, Osiris was the son of Ra, who later became associated with Amon. In the New Kingdom, these melded together, producing a union of Amon-Ra with his son Osiris. According to Martin Bernal (Black Athena, 1.115-6), Alexander the Great saw himself “as this syncretic divinity, both Ammon and his son,” identified also with Dionysus. Bernal elaborates: “the actual conquests of Alexander increased the importance of the myths of the vast eastern civilizing expedition of Dionysos or –... Read more
In Histories II, Herodotus claims that Greeks borrowed the very name Dionysus from Egyptians, not to mention the phallic procession associated with that god: “it was Melampous who introduced the phallic procession, and from Melampous that the Greeks learnt the rites that they now perform. Melampous, in my view, was an able man who acquired the art of divination and brought into Greece, with little change, a number of things which he had learned in Egypt, and amongst them the... Read more
Building on the work of David Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow), and Cass Sustein (Nudge), and others, Max Bazerman of Harvard Business School discusses The Power of Noticing in a forthcoming book. He starts with the Youtube video that we’ve all seen: You’re asked to count the number of dribbles in the 2-minute video, and you completely miss the guy in the monkey suit who crosses the screen. Focus is valuable, Bazerman agrees, but focus can make us miss relevant information.... Read more
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