Love him or not, you gotta admit that Thomas Aquinas is thorough. One of the initial negative answers to the question, “Are there sufficient reasons for the ceremonies pertaining to holy things?” ( ST I-II, 102) is about the orientation of Israelite sanctuaries. Objection 5 is: that “the power of the First Mover, i.e. God, appears first of all in the east, for it is in that quarter that the first movement begins. But the tabernacle was set up for... Read more
Matthew Levering has a fascinating discussion of Thomas’s understanding of Christian worship as the fulfillment of the temple in his outstanding Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah and Temple: Salvation According to Thomas Aquinas (91-97) . From 1 Kings 8, Thomas claims that God “infinitely transcends the Temple’ and yet has “chosen to place his ‘name’ there.” What does it mean for God’s “name” to dwell in the temple? Thomas says that it means “that the liturgy of the Temple (i.e., the... Read more
I offer some reflections on writing next door this morning. Read more
In a wide-ranging 2001 review of books on “new natural law” by John Finnis and Robert George published in the journal Religion ), G. Scott Davis zeroes in on sexual ethics, which he notes is one of the main themes of George’s essays on natural law. Drawing on the Finnis/Grisez notion of “basic human goods,” George argues for legal restrictions on pornography and other forms of sexual immorality, and argues that non-procreational sex is an assault on the basic good... Read more
Reflecting on the reference to Psalm 69:9 in John 2:17, Alan Kerr ( The Temple of Jesus’ Body: The Temple Theme in the Gospel of John (Library of New Testament Studies) , 85-6) notes that the verb “consume” is a sacrificial term that might refer to Jesus’ death. Thus, “within this pericope dealing with the expulsion of the sacrificial animals from the Temple here is an intimation that Jesus Himself will become a sacrifice. Furthermore, Caiaphas’s prophecy . . .... Read more
Alan Kerr ( The Temple of Jesus’ Body: The Temple Theme in the Gospel of John (Library of New Testament Studies) , 71) offers this comment on Jesus’ statement that Nicodemus had to be born of the Spirit before entering the kingdom: “It is almost universally accepted that Spirit here refers to the Spirit of God. But at this stage in the Gospel there was no Spirit (7:39), because Jesus was not yet glorified. It is not until Jesus is... Read more
In his 1993 Word and Glory: On the Exegetical and Theological Background of John’s Prologue (Library of New Testament Studies) (79-82), Craig A. Evans lays out five parallels between the account of Moses’ intercession at Sinai (Exodus 33-34) and the latter part of the Johannine prologue (1:14-18): First, the general contrast of Moses and Jesus, between the “grace” of the Mosaic order and the “grace in place of grace” that comes with Jesus. Second, Moses asks to seek the glory... Read more
At the TLS web site , John Gray reviews Vladimir Tismaneanu’s The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century . Among other things, Gray highlights the continuities between Communism and Fascism. Soviet Russia disenfranchised “former people,” a designation that, according to Tismaneanu implied that they “were not quite human.” Gray adds, “disenfranchised groups included functionaries of the tsarist police and military, class aliens who lived off unearned income, clergy of all religions and anyone economically... Read more
In a paper delivered at Princeton in 2012, Jennifer Herdt examines internal shifts in Reformed understandings of natural law enabled a merger between Reformed natural law thinking and “the modern natural law enterprise of the secular science of human nature.” The shift is several-fold. Calvin affirmed that human beings have natural knowledge of God’s commandments, and affirmed (in contrast to Aquinas) that this natural knowledge has specific content. According to Calvin, “all nations condemn murder, theft, adultery, and false witness,... Read more
Given the prominence of temple Christology in the New Testament, we’d expect to find it developed among the church fathers and medieval theologians. Athanasius develops Christology from this angle (Letter 60). The Arians, he says, “approve the former people [the Jews] for the honor paid by them to the Temple, but they will not worship the Lord who is in the flesh as a God indwelling a temple . . . And [the Jews] did not, when they saw the... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In