Richard Hays gave a wonderful lecture on the creeds and the gospels at the Trinity School of Ministry conference. A few highlights: 1) From Matthew, he pointed to the fact that people bow to/worship Jesus seven times in the gospel. This might be taken as no more than civil worship, except for Jesus’ citation of the law “You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve” (4:10). The fact that Jesus later accepts worship indicates that... Read more
Thomas Buchan gave a superb response paper at the Ancient Evangelical Future Conference at Trinity School of Ministry. Buchan’s paper was dynamite under every idealization of Nicea and its effect on the church. For starters, he pointed out that the Nicene Creed was not the only creed in circulation. There were many pre-Nicene baptismal creeds, and the effect of Nicea was not to eliminate but to regulate these. The Nicene Creed, further, was not originally intended as a confession for... Read more
Michael Lefebvre’s Singing the Songs of Jesus: Revisiting the Psalms is a solid, remarkably in-depth defense of Psalm-singing. He roots the study in an examination of the organization of the Levitical choir in Chronicles, and the king’s role as the lay liturgical leader “under whose hand” the Levites led the sacrifice of praise. From this he argues that the son of David, the king of the new Israel, also leads the service of musical worship. In singing the Psalms, we... Read more
On the Trinity House site, Mark Horne discusses Romans 1 and asks how Paul says wrath is revealed . Read more
Blind people are not themselves cursed. Jesus made that clear. Yet blindness is a sign of the curse. It signals the possibility of objectification, the possibility (unknown in Eden) of gazing at a person who cannot return the gaze, the possibility of a unilateral gaze. In blindness is embedded the possibility of sexual abuse, of totalitarian regimes, of anti-humanism. But Jesus came to give sight to the blind, which is to say, to give the gazed-at the dignity of a... Read more
The NYT Book Review has a review of Giovanni Della Casa’s Renaissance etiquette book, Galateo: Or, The Rules of Polite Behavior . The reviewer, Judith Martin sums up some of the wisdom: “Don’t be disgusting. Pretty much everything that comes out of a bodily orifice meets his definition of disgusting — so much so that the mere sight of someone washing his hands would upset people, as their minds would leap to the function that had necessitated that cleansing. Spittle... Read more
Pastor Ralph Smith continues his analysis of Deuteronomy 14 at the Trinity House web site. Read more
According to the standard story, Catholicism made its peace with democracy rather suddenly in the first half of the twentieth century, culminating in Vatican II. On this narrative, Vatican I represented the kind of authoritarianism that the second Vatican council overturned. Not so, argues Emile Perreau-Saussine in his Catholicism and Democracy: An Essay in the History of Political Thought . On the contrary, Vatican II continued and completed what had begun in Vatican II. This argument involves seeing Vatican I... Read more
Looking at maps of the 19th-century globe, you get the impression of a solid, complete (and a solidly and completely pink) British empire. That’s a “cartographical illusion,” says John Darwin in his Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain . We forget that “this was always an empire-in-making, indeed an empire scarcely half-made.” It was not one empire, but several. Darwin writes, Both at home and abroad, empire took different forms and assumed different meanings. It attracted different allies, often... Read more
An 1880 ad for Singer Sewing machines offers a vision of humanity united by technology: “On every sea are floating the Singer Machines; along every road pressed by the foot of civilized man this tireless ally of the world’s great sisterhood is going upon its errand of helpfulness. Its cheering tune is understood no less by the sturdy German matron than by the slender Japanese maiden; it sings as intelligibly to the flaxen-haired Russian peasant girl as to the dark-eyed... Read more
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