Paul’s pneumatology in summary: The Lord who has become life-giving Spirit fills him. The Lord, the Spirit transforms him from glory to glory as he gazes at the glory of God in the face of Jesus. Since the glory of Jesus is the glory of the cross, Paul’s translation into glory means sharing, even “filling up” (Colossians 1:24), the sufferings of Jesus. Cruciformed by the Spirit, he is afflicted for the “salvation” of the churches (2 Corinthians 1:6). And this... Read more
Gadamer says that every thing that is to be interpreted gives rise toa plurality of interpretations. This is not a free-for-all but rather “the work’s own possibilities of being that emerge as the work explicates itself, as it were, in the variety of its aspects.” A reader of a poem can note the meter, the rhyme, the elegance of the lines, the imagery, the themes, the relation to the other works of the same poet, the relation to other works... Read more
Gadamer writes ( Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) ): “A person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting. He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text . . . . Working out this fore-projection [prejudice], which is constantly revised in terms of what emerges as he penetrates into the meaning, is understanding what is there . . . . The process that Heidegger describes [in... Read more
Westphal has the wit to ask Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes which author died, and he gives this answer: “According to familiar versions of theism, God is Creator, and the world has all and only those features that God (intended to) put there; if there is a certain indeterminacy due to creaturely freedom, that is only because God (intended to) put creaturely freedom in the world.” The author who died is the text’s “Creator,” and like the Creator of theism, the... Read more
Westphal asks why Christians are hesitant to affirm the inevitability of interpretation, and answers that denying the necessity of interpretation seems to be the easiest way to affirm truth as correspondence and to preserve objectivity. If interpretation intervenes into every act of knowing, then it doesn’t seem that we can actually know what’s out there, we can’t actually know what’s in the text. Objectivity seems to diffuse into subjective interpretations. One of Westphal’s responses is to show that “the whole... Read more
Merold Westphal ( Whose Community? Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture) ) notes that “realism begins as the claim that the world (the real) is ‘out there’ and is what it is independent of whether or not we might think about it.” But this simple claim is not all that is involved in realism since “no one actually denies this.” The further claim is that “we can (at least sometimes) know reality just as... Read more
Galatians 3:27-28: All of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free man; there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. We live in a feminized culture, and that feminization began with the church. Here in Moscow, we have set ourselves against these cultural confusions by emphasizing biblical teaching about the headship of husbands, the authority of fathers, and... Read more
“Behold your King comes.” That’s the story of the Bible. Yahweh came as Judge to Eden. He came as Kinsman Redeemer and Lawgiver to Israel. He came in the flesh. He came back from the grave. He will come again. Your King comes, and each time He shakes the heavens until stars fall like figs and He rolls up the sky like a scroll. On Palm Sunday, He rides like the wind over tree branches straight to the temple, where... Read more
Hovey suggests that the exhortation to “lose your life” is ecclesially and eucharistically embodied: “Individual bodies that feed on the body of Christ through incorporation and participation no longer belong to individual disciples; they belong to the church. This is a loss only insofar as the fear that death names continues to be a basis for making decisions about how to live . . . . trying to preserve the body [or individuality] inevitably means being cut off from the... Read more
Hovey has a remarkable discussion of the young man who is stripped of his linen garment in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:51-52). In the garden, he wears the linen garment of a martyr. But like the other disciples he is not prepared for arrest, trial, the cross. He flees without his martyr robe, and he flees naked, ashamed: “When the church cannot imagine that it might die that death, it not only ceases to follow Christ but does so... Read more
Leithart
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