Friedman ( The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century , 39-40) says that “War is central to the American experience . . . . It is built into American culture and deeply rooted in American geopolitics.” This is no unsupported screed. He points out that “The United States has been at war for about 10 percent of its existence. This statistic includes only major wars – the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, World... Read more
America often claims to be the cornerstone of global order. Much of its foreign policy, argues George Friedman ( The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century , 46), is about creating disorder in order to prevent another power from imposing order and gaining power. If you think order was the goal in Afghanistan and Iraq, American actions are difficult to explain. But Friendman says that “the goal of these interventions was never to achieve something – whatever... Read more
Reader Cas Saternos offers these thoughts in response to a post several weeks ago on knowing. The rest of this post is from him: Your comments on the three stage or “moments” of knowing fit well with the use of the term “know” in the musical realm. Consider the phrase “I know that song.” Depending on the speaker and context, each of the three stages might be at the fore-front. 1) Used commonly to mean “I recognize the melody.” This... Read more
Jenson summarizes Jonathan Edwards’ critique of substance in Systematic Theology: Volume 2: The Works of God (Systematic Theology (Oxford Hardcover)) (39-41). Edwards targets the mechanization of the world in Newton and Locke, arguing that “Christianity could not long coexist with a mechanistic worldview.” That was no problem, since for Edwards “mechanism was . . . a mere conceptual blunder, an anachronism that resulted from reading the antique conceptuality of substance onto terms in the formulas of modern science.” When the... Read more
Jenson ( The knowledge of things hoped for : the sense of theological discourse , 174) summarizes his critique of Bultmann thusly: “For Bultmann, when Jesus’ history is to be told as about God, as eschatological occurrence, it is reduced to the ‘that.’ In the proclamation we meet the Christ who lives in the event of the proclamation; to do this we do not need to learn about the historical Jesus. This is the christological version of the claim that... Read more
Deeana Copeland Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish Text in the Later Middle Ages (Jewish Culture and Contexts) . Philadelphia:University ofPennsylvania Press, 2007. Modern biblical criticism is the product of Jewish-Christian cooperation. On the one hand, it is a creation of Anti-Calvinist Pietists in theNetherlands. Against the Protestant Orthodox insistence that even the vowel points of the Hebrew text were divinely inspired, pietist Arminians known as Collegiants exalted the spirit over the... Read more
William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hardback, 285 pp, $49.95. In the beginning was religion, and only religion. Now religion was irrational, absolutist, and divisive, and so chaos was on the face of the earth. Religion drove kings mad. Because of religion, because religion was all, Catholics killed Protestants, Protestants killed Catholics, and both Protestants and Catholics killed pagans across the seas. And... Read more
Paul Fiddes ( The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature (Challenges in Contemporary Theology) , 7) repeats a truism when he writes, “Poetic metaphor and narrative rejoice in ambiguity and the opening up of multiple meaning; doctrine will always seek to reduce to concepts the images and stories upon which it draws . . . . . doctrine uses metaphor in an attempt to fix meaning, to define and limit a spectrum of possible interpretations . . . .... Read more
Rosenstock-Huessy ( The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun (The Cloister Library) , 130) note that language, like all life, deteriorates naturally “from inspiration to routine”: “Every time we speak we eiyther renew or cheapen the words we use.” Christian language is no exception: “Christian language can be abused like any other . . . . . Looking back into the past, we can see that whole streams of Christian language have cooled off into geological stratifications. The languages... Read more
Repetition is not itself bad, Rosenstock-Huessy says ( The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun (The Cloister Library) , 80-1): “Life itself rests on a certain balance between recurrent and novel processes; the former are our fixed capital investment, the latter our free range of choice, selection, change, at any given moment. Unless the achievements of the past were continually reproduced along with the fresh creations of the present, there would be more mutation without cumulative growth of any... Read more
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