Jesus threatens to come to the church at Sardis “like a thief” (Revelation 3:3), and later warns the unprepared in Babylon that He is coming liek a thief (16:15). The latter passage indicates what Jesus is coming for: “Blessed is he who stays awake and keeps his garments, lest he walk about naked and men see his shame.” Several things click into place. First, the re-use of the image of the thief (these are the only two uses in Revelation)... Read more
Before the fall, Adam and Eve were naked and not ashamed in the garden (Genesis 2:25). After the fall, they saw their nakedness (3:7), and their behavior manifests shame, even though the word is not used. In the LXX, the two words “naked” and some form of “shame” are used together only twice. In Isaiah 20:4, the words are used to describe the people of Israel as they are driven into exile by Assyria naked and exposed. It is a... Read more
The church in Laodicea is wretched without knowing it (Revelation 3:17). The only other use of the word “wretched” in the New Testament is in Romans 7, where Paul laments after describing his divided existence under the law, that he is a “wretched” man longing for release. Wretchedness is an “Egyptian” condition, the condition before exodus, the condition of David crying for deliverance (Psalm 11:6 LXX; Engl. 12:5). Unlike Paul, the Laodiceans don’t even know they are wretched. Paul’s wretchedness... Read more
Christian Smith’s How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps is fairly predictable. His criticisms of evangelicalism are on target in the main, and his Catholic arguments are pretty standard. Smith is careful about his audience: He is addressing “normal science evangelicalism,” and he knows that other varieties of Protestantism exist. Unfortunately, like most Catholic apologists, he doesn’t really spend much time talking about those other varieties. His arguments glance off of... Read more
Mead gives a nicely varnished picture of British establishment and support of its global maritime order. He doesn’t deny that the British broke some eggs, but he’s more interested in the omelet. C.A. Bayly’s superb The Birth of the Modern World: 1780-1914 (Blackwell History of the World) gives more on-the-ground details. Britain’s rise to maritime dominance was driven by ideological support for free trade and the practical necessity of finding raw materials and food to support the growing and industrializing... Read more
Mead gives a concise summary of Anglo-American military successes during the past three centuries: “Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that established Parliamentary and Protestant rule in Britain, the Anglo-Americans have been on the winning side in every major international conflict. The War of the League of Augsburg, the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Success, the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution (Britain lost, but America won), the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, World War... Read more
Mead responds to the notion that civilizations and empires inevitably decline with this: Arguments about inevitable decline, articulated by Spengler and Toynbee, “looked more probable in the early and middle years of the twentieth century than they do today. Consider the idea that all civilizations decline. Fifty or one hundred years ago, perhaps, China looked like an example of a formerly great civilization (and empire) that had fallen into contemptible weakness and backwardness. Does it still look that way today?... Read more
One of Mead’s main themes is that Anglo-American strategy during the past several centuries has focused on the development of maritime order. In this perspective, the world is single, but divided into different theaters: “The theaters are all linked by the sea, and whoever controls the sea can choose the architecture that shapes the world. The primary ambition of Anglo-American power is not dominance in a particular theater; it is to dominate the structure that shapes the conditions within which... Read more
Walter Russell Mead acknowledges in God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (Vintage) that balance of power politics is a matter of letting rivals busy their giddy minds with foreign quarrels. Britain was happy to leave Continental fights to Continentals: “Let France and Prussia duke it out on the Rhine; let Austria and Prussia batter one another blood over Silesia, an irregular, slightly sausage-shaped territory now part of Poland that is roughly equal to the... Read more
Gordon summarizes epics that previewed the Homeric epics in quite direct ways. The “Ugaritic Legend of Kret is of Cretan derivation as the name of the hero indicates. Like the Iliad, the story concerns a war waged so that a king might regain his rightful wife who is being withheld from him, in a distant city. This theme is found nowhere else among known texts in any language prior to our East Mediterranean tablets of the Amarna Age. It is... Read more
Leithart
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