A summary of Barth’s Trinitarian theology, mostly in the form of brief questions and answers. The exercise is expositional, not critical; my answers would not be the same as Barth’s at every point. The page numbers in parenthesis below are from Church Dogmatics I.1. 1. Why does he discuss Trinity here, at the beginning, in the doctrine of revelation? We can’t discuss revelation without asking what God is being revealed. 2. How is revelation connected to the nature of God?... Read more
A summary of Barth’s Trinitarian theology, mostly in the form of brief questions and answers. The exercise is expositional, not critical; my answers would not be the same as Barth’s at every point. The page numbers in parenthesis below are from Church Dogmatics I.1. 1. Why does he discuss Trinity here, at the beginning, in the doctrine of revelation? We can’t discuss revelation without asking what God is being revealed. 2. How is revelation connected to the nature of God?... Read more
Matthew 18:5: Whoever receives one such child in my Name receives Me. Here at Trinity, we baptize infants, a lot of them. Most churches throughout the centuries have done the same. We also believe that the Lord’s Supper is open to baptized children who are capable of sharing it. That is more unusual, especially among Reformed Protestants. One of the reasons we baptize infants and invite children to this meal has to do with the character of names. Names are... Read more
One of God’s great acts of grace is to reveal His Name. The gods of the nations often had secret names, known only to priests and used only for occult spells. The gods hid to shield themselves from the demands of needy humans. Yahweh doesn’t hide His Name, doesn’t reserve it to a tiny elite, doesn’t leave us to figure it out for ourselves. He tells us His Name, and in doing that allows us to claim His attention. When... Read more
After quoting extensively from Isaac Watts’s nationalistic renditions of the Psalms (Psalm 47 is made to say “The British islands are the Lord’s, / There Abraham’s God is known”), Willie James Jennings ( The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race ) writes that “Britain is mapped onto the biblical journey of Israel. Israel’s history disappears, and the British nation appears as the real history of God with God’s people. There is no continuity between Israel’s history and that... Read more
In the first wasf of the bride in Song of Songs 4, the bride is seen behind a veil. Her eyes are like doves “behind your veil” (v. 1), her temples like pomegranate “behind your veil” (v. 3; cf. 6:7). There is no veil in the second extended wasf in 7:1-9. And the lover can see what he has not seen before – the curves of her hips (v. 1), her navel (v. 2), her belly (v. 2), her hair... Read more
Paul Griffiths is always wise: “religious reading requires the establishment of a particular set of relations between the reader and what is read. These are principally relations of reverence, delight, awe, and wonder, relations that, once established, lead to . . . close, repetitive kinds of reading . . . . The questioning of authority and the concern with preliminary issues of method and justification (intellectual attitudes and concerns typical of modernity) make the establishment of such relations almost impossible... Read more
Peter warms himself at the fire in the High Priest’s courtyard (Mark 14:54; John 18:18). In only one passage of the Old Testament does anyone warm himself by a fire – in Isaiah 44:15-16. In Isaiah the fire is fueled by the wood left over from carving an idol. Peter joins an idolatrous band warming by the fire. The fire is stoked up by the leftovers of the High Priest’s image-making. Read more
Revelation uses the word “soul” ( psuche ) seven times (6:9; 8:9; 12:11; 16:3; 18:13, 14; 20:4). (Two moose just walked past my library window . . . .) The “seven” is suggestive of Genesis 1, and the other sevens of Revelation. Whether or not we can match up the seven uses of the word with seven days of creation, there is definitely a sequence to the use of the word. In 6:9, we are introduced to the souls of... Read more
Jesus threatens to vomit the lukewarm from His mouth (Revelation 3:16). That picks up on Old Testament descriptions of the land comiting out the inhabitants. But it also reminds us of the fish that vomited Jonah out onto dry land. That is a “return from exile” image: Jonah, the Israelite prophet, goes into the belly of the sea monster and is later returned to land, “vomited” by the imperial fish. Israel, once vomited out of the land into exile, is... Read more
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