When Jonathan eats honey during the battle, his eyes are “brightened” (1 Samuel 14:27, 29; Heb. for “brightened” is ‘or ). By eating honey, his eyes burn like lamps. By eating honey, his eyes burn like the flames of Jesus’ eyes (Revelation 1:14), eyes that illuminate dark places, eyes that flash out in judgment against the wicked. By eating honey, Jonathan becomes a replica of the divine warrior. By eating honey , all this happens. Jonathan takes honey from the... Read more
Ministers raise hands over the congregation at the closing benediction, in imitation of Aaronic priests (Leviticus 9:22) and of Jesus (Luke 24:50). Why? Jesus blessed the disciples just before He parted from them, ascending into a cloud (Luke 24:51; Acts 1:9-10). Benediction is linked with ascension. Jesus spreads His hands, and then flies up to be enthroned in the glory He had with His Father from the beginning. And this connects with the common biblical image of the wings of... Read more
In his classic study of Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Stories of Faith & Fame) , p. 418 , W. H. C. Frend concludes that “The ultimate legacy of the persecutions was the lasting division of Christendom into its eastern and western parts.” In the east, a “more optimistic view of the destiny of man and his relations to his Maker” made it easy to incorporate the Emperor and his empire into Christianity: “The Emperor was accepted as... Read more
Martyrs are almost by definition in positions of weakness. But the early accounts of Christian martyrs show that martyrdom tended to overturn the balance of power. Two examples from Eusebius illustrate the point. One story begins with a domestic conflict. A Christian wife married to a philandering husband decided “not to be involved in this abominable misconduct by maintaining the marriage bond as sharer of his board and bed,” so she served him the repudium to free herself from the... Read more
Intellectually and politically, Christianity is a stability. We have a foundation. But Christianity also has a high tolerance for instability, uncertainty, imperfection, incompletion. The reason is that our foundation is that our foundation is not below us, set in the past; rather, our foundation is above us, in a heavenly city, and it is future, eschatological. Christians can embrace all the relativities and penultimacies of history without becoming relativists or skeptics – not because we have a certitude behind us... Read more
Steven Crowell ( A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy) ) gives this helpful explanation of what Husserl means when he says, counter-intuitively, that objects are “constituted” by the mind: “he means neither that the mind composes a mental representation from subjective data nor that it creates objects in a causal way. The basic idea is relatively simple. The same entity can be experienced in a variety of ways: this rock, which I kick out of the... Read more
Why, Leszel Kolakowski ( Husserl Search For Certitude ) wants to know, do philosophers talke about “Ego” when they mean the person, the self, or the soul? He thinks it’s a trick of language: You can’t say that the Ego is the philosopher, a real “I,” since for these philosophers the Ego in view is not identical to any particular person. It’s ungrammatical to say taht the “I thinks” or to use “I” as a noun, as in “the I.”... Read more
In his contribution to A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy) , Steven Crowell summarizes the aims of phenomonology: it is “descriptive” rather than “constructive”; it aims at “clarification, not explanation”; it is “eidetic and not a factual inquiry,” which means “it is not concerned to describe all the properties of some particular thing but to uncover what belongs to it essentially as a thing of that kind. Most importantly, it is “reflective”: “it is not concerned... Read more
In his German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781-1801 (p. 138-9), Frederick Beiser offers this lucid explanation of “the transcendental” in Kant: “Rather than reducing experience down to the level of individual consciousness, the critical philosophy makes both the subjective and objective- understood as the representations of inner and outer sense – equal and coordinate parts of a single intersubjective structure or form. This normative order is neither mental nor physical but transcendental, the necessary condition for the possibility of... Read more
According to Dermot Moran’s account ( Introduction to Phenomenology ), Husserl’s phenomenology was an effort to arrest “cultural fragmentation and relativism, brought about by deep uncertainties about the nature and project of reason in the twentieth century. Husserl saw himself as a visionary pioneer, approaching his themes with an almost religious fervour, even comparing himself to a Moses leading his people to the promised land.” To secure knowledge, he followed Descartes’ lead. Husserl concluded that “consciousness is the basis of... Read more
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