Wells again, commenting on the wedding at Cana: “This is not a story of the transformation of poison into safe water. It is not a story of a world deformed by sin being converted into a clean and healthy community. It is not a story of the obliteration or extermination of evil by a divine cleanser. It is a story of the inadequacy of fallen creation and the inadequacy of Israel (the six ritual water jars) being transformed by the... Read more
Another quotation from Wells, summing up the thesis of his book: “God has given his people everything they need to worship him, to be his friends, and to eat with him. He has done this by giving them the body of Christ. He gives his people the body of Christ in three forms – Jesus, the Church, and the Eucharist. In each case he gives his people more than enough. He overwhelms them by the abundance of his gifts. His... Read more
In his God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics (Challenges in Contemporary Theology) , Samuel Wells challenges the assumption of scarcity that he takes to be “a consistent majority strand in Christian ethics . . . that ethics the very difficult enterprise of making bricks from straw.” It seems there is not enough of anything: (more…) Read more
Expounding on the differences between explanation and narration, Craig Hovey ( To Share in the Body: A Theology of Martyrdom for Today’s Church ) connects them to two forms of witness: “If the eyewitness knows about the particular case and the character witness knows about the person, the expert witness knows neither of these things. Instead, she knows how cases like this usually work – whether this kind of gun could have made that kind of bullet hole, whether this... Read more
David Luy has a helpful article in the April 2011 issue of the International Journal of Systematic Theology , where he summarizes how von Balthasar harmonizes his Trinitarian theology with his claim that Christ, especially in the cross, is the “form” of God’s glory and beauty. he claims that God’s self-disclosure in creation must be understood in terms of an aesthetic relation between God and the world, and that this linkage depends on three “tethers” that all have to remain... Read more
Martin Peretz, never one to mince words, has some harsh ones for Obama regarding his comments to Medvedev: ” the message, the important one, concerns us, here in America. It is that the American people can’t be trusted if the president is honest with them about what he proposes. More bluntly, that the American people are not trusted by their own president. Otherwise the president would tell us the truth about his intentions. And here he is, admitting his distrust... Read more
In his highly readable The Sublime (The New Critical Idiom) , Philip Shaw lucidly summarizes the standard distinction between the sublime and the beautiful: “The sublime is greater than the beautiful; the sublime is dark, profound, and overwhelming and implicitly masculine, whereas the beautiful is light, fleeting, and charming and implicitly feminine. Where the sublime is a divisive force, encouraging feelings of differences and deference, the beautiful encourages a spirit of unity and harmony. In political terms, the impulse of... Read more
Seerveld argues that “Christians in the twentieth century who adopt Beauty in some transcendental way as the key to understand art and human aesthetic activity are easily misled into also adopting the apologetic attitude toward art and the ontological framework in which Beauty was born.” He thinks that Kuyper and Maritain among others fall into this trap: They each “seek divine sanction for earthly art by giving it a heavenly meaning . . . working with an analogical metaphysics partial... Read more
Calvin Seerveld ( Rainbows for the Fallen World: Aesthetic Life and Artistic Task ) points to the 18th-century introduction of “sublime” as the beginning of the end of aesthetics focused on beauty: “When ‘the sublime’ became understood around the middle of the eighteenth century a a vehement emotion filled with terror and obscurity before immeasurable and overpowering natural phenomenon . . . and was accepted as proper for English gentry to experience, even preferable to the pleasures of ‘beauty’ the... Read more
Kuyper endorses poiesis , then waxes quasi-Platonic: “You are familiar with the question, already mentioned, whether art should imitate nature or should transcend it. In Greece grapes were painted with such accuracy that birds were deceived by their appearance and tried to eat them. And this imitation of nature seemed the highest ideal to the Socratic school. Herein lies the truth, all too forgotten by idealists, that the forms and relations exhibited by nature are and ever must remain the... Read more
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