Adam and Eve seize the forbidden fruit before it’s time. When they cover themselves, they again jump the gun – using leaves to hide their shameful nakedness. They aren’t ready for that either, and the Lord gives them skins of a sacrificed animal to cover. From that time until the Last Adam, human beings come into Yahweh’s presence wearing animal skins. At Sinai, Yahweh allows a handful of people to approach Him wearing plants as well as animal skin –... Read more
The promises you’ll make in a moment are utterly open-ended. You can’t be sure what will happen later today, much less for the rest of your life. You can take these vows confidently only if you entrust yourselves to the God who is Alpha and Omega, the God who is before every past and waiting ahead of every future. To live by faith is to live by prayer. Every time you pray, you confess that you don’t have what it... Read more
Griffiths ( Song of Songs (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible) ) suggests that we must interpret the Song’s bodily imagery through the theological lens of Paul’s teaching concerning the body of Christ. “The complex and fluid relations of one body part to another – of hand to arm, of lips to tongue, of skin to blood – together constitute an integral organism that is what it is because it participates in the body of Christ. The parts complement and... Read more
In his study of Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (p. 11), Lawrence Kramer describes the shift from modern to postmodern in terms of speech-act theory. Modernism privileged the constative and subordinated the performative; postmodernism deconstructs the hierarchy and especially highlights the fact that all constatives are also performatives: “The performative is the ‘originary’ category within which the constative is produced, enfranchised, recast, subverted, and ramified. In this context, communication appears as a process in which socially and discursively situated subjects... Read more
Griffiths argues ( Song of Songs (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible) , pp. 30-31) that the analogy between human love and God’s gift of love to us is found in “the sheer excess of human sexual love, its radical disproportion to its biological and social functions, its deranged openness to configuration in almost any direction (there are necrophiles, fetishists, practitioners of bestiality, those sexually obsessed with bodies of children, and so on) – meaning that it forces upon anyone... Read more
Paul Griffiths brilliantly analyzes the lovers’ obsession with one another’s bodies in the Song ( Song of Songs (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible) , p. 30): “Lovers are interested in one another’s bodies, indeed absorbed by them. They gaze into one another’s eyes, they kiss one another’s lips, they lick and suck and graze upon every inch of one another’s skin, driven by a desire to inhabit and be inhabited by the other’s physical being, an urge to become... Read more
Here’s an intriguing etymology. The Hebrew word na’ah is used only three times in the Old Testament (Psalm 93:5; Song of Songs 1:10; Isaiah 52:7), meaning “to be beautiful.” It appears to come from navah , “to sit, to dwell.” It has the sense of “sitting well” or “being suitable.” Something is lovely if it dwells fittingly in its setting – like the holiness that “sits well” in the house of Yahweh (Psalm 93:5) or the rows of ornaments that... Read more
Some reflections on how the Bible is practical at http://www.firstthings.com/ this morning. Read more
Summarizing the 16th-century Reformed formulations of Eucharistic theology, John Williamson Nevin ( The Mystical Presence: And the Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper (Mercersburg Theology Study) , p. 51) says: “The sacrament is made to carry with it an objective force so far as its principle design is concerned. It is not simply suggestive, commemorative or representational. It is not a sign, a picture, deriving its significance from the mind of the beholder. The virtue which it... Read more
One of the most heartening developments in the Reformed world in the past two decades is the renewal of interest in the Mercersberg movement. And one of the most heartening developments within that development is Wipf & Stock’s plan to publish a multi-volume collection of Mercersberg theology, under the general editorship of my hyperenergetic friend Brad Littlejohn. You can hear Brad talk about the project here: http://trinitytalkradio.com/2012/05/mercersburg-theology-with-brad-littlejohn/ . Some of the material to be published has not been published since... Read more
Leithart
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