In her delightful Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia , Suzanne Massie has a wonderful chapter on Peter the Great. She gives a vivid portrait of his 1697 visit to the West, the first time in six hundred years a Tsar had left Russia, and the first visit a Tsar ever made to the West: “In March 1697, led by Peter’s Genevan General Lefort, the friend and adviser of his youth, a Grand Embassy of some two... Read more
Luke 12:49-53 begins with Jesus impatient to cast fire to the earth. He wants to kindle the fire that he came to kindle. John the Baptist came to burn the fruitless trees, and said that Jesus is the one with the Spirit and fire. Enough already; let it burn, Jesus says. But then immediately He speaks of His own baptism by fire. That is the fire that He is impatient to see (v. 50). And then immediately He speaks of... Read more
Thomas wrote, “Being is two-fold: material and immaterial. In material beings, which are limited, each thing is only what it is; this stone is this stone, nothing more. But in immaterial beings, which are vast and, as it were, infinite, not being limited by matter, a thing is not only what it is, but in some fashion it is other things as well.” Several observations: First, souls are immaterial things that are both themselves and also other things. For the... Read more
“I know My own and My own know Me,” Jesus the Good Shepherd says (John 10:14). Then He adds, “even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father” (v. 15). There’s a neat symmetry here: “I know My own” matches “the Father knows Me”; Jesus as Good Shepherd stands in a paternal relation to His sheep. “My own know Me” matches “I know the Father”; the sheep have a filial relation to the Father. But this ABAB symmetry... Read more
“Glorious things are spoken of you, Zion, city of our God” (Psalm 87:3). What sorts of glories ( nikbadot , from kabad )? Battles won? Cultural achievements? The temple? In Psalm 87, Zion is glorious because Zion is a fruitful mother. Like Proverbs 31, Psalm 87 is a heroic celebration of domesticity. Verse 3 lists some of Zion’s unlikely children: Egypt, Babylon, Philistia, Tyre, Ethiopia. “Each one was born in her (v. 5). Yahweh tallies up the peoples and finds... Read more
In his brief The Meaning of Tradition , Congar offers some helpful arguments and analogies for understanding the Catholic meaning of Tradition. In its most fundamental sense, Tradition is the thing handed-over, which is to say, the Son Himself handed to the world by the Father: “God (the Father) gives his Son to the world, he delivers him to the world . . . . Thus the economy begins by a divine transmission or tradition; it is continued by the... Read more
It’s hard to imagine a more succinct or accurate description of typology than that of Danielou ( Bible and the Liturgy ): “That the realities of the Old Testament are figures of those of the New is one of the principles of biblical theology. This science of the similitudes between the two Testaments is called typology . And here we would do well to remind ourselves of its foundation, for this is to be found in the Old Testament itself.... Read more
The soul ( nephesh ) is the seat of desire in Scripture. Souls hunger for food, thirst for water, yearn for God like a panting deer in a dry and weary land where there is no water. And, souls long for other souls. “He whom my soul loves” is the Bride’s epithet for her Lover (1:7; 3:1-4). In the longing of her soul, she seeks the Lover’s paths and resting places; in the desperation of her soul, she searches the... Read more
A friend, Mike Farley, has assembled and organized the Eucharistic meditations from my blog and made them available here: http://crossroadspresworship.net/meditations-on-the-lords-supper/ Read more
Right from the beginning, Dodi regards the Bride as the most beautiful ( yapheh ) among women. She is beautiful like Sarai, Rachel, Abigail, David’s daughter Tamar, David’s son Absalom (!), Esther. Dodi or others praise her beauty over and over in the Song (1:8; 1:15 [2x]; 2:10, 13; 4:1 [2x], 7; 5:9; 6:1, 4, 10). That’s a total of twelve times. She is beautiful to the twelfth degree, she possesses an Israel degree of beauty like the city of... Read more
Leithart
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