In the same lecture, Meyers notes that the apostles at the beginning of Acts charge the Jewish leaders specifically with putting Jesus on the cross. That charge disappears from Acts after the church disperses from Jerusalem. When Paul returns to Jerusalem, his indictment of the Jews is different. He doesn’t accuse them of killing Jesus, but of shedding the blood of Stephen (Acts 22:20). Luke shows us that before the final turning to the Gentiles, the servants of Jesus must... Read more
In a superb Biblical Horizons lecture, Jeff Meyers pointed out that Jerusalem’s Jews become more intensely hostily to the gospel through the course of Acts. Priests and the council attack the apostles at the beginning, but let them go with a warning. Finally, they join to stone Stephen, and the action moves away from Jerusalem for most of the book. Finally, Paul returns to Jerusalem in the final section, and everyone’s become ravenous: He is arrested by a bestial mob... Read more
Human labor is an imitation of and participation in the creative work of God, and fulfilling human labor has the same structure as God’s creative work. We take hold of the world, tear it apart, reassemble it, give it a new name, and then evaluate the products of our labor (as James Jordan has pointed out). Fulfilling labor has its telos in Sabbath. “Sabbath” here not only means “ceasing” but “enjoyment.” At the end of the creation week, God saw... Read more
Wise observations from Mead: “Perhaps the rarest thing in the United States today is to find a well-educated young American who sees earning the respect of ordinary Americans on an ordinary job as the necessary foundation to a strong personal character and valuable career. Plenty of young Americans study abroad, precisely to acquire a sympathetic understanding of people different from themselves, but few venture from the citadels of privilege to learn about their fellow citizens at home: Tibet, yes; Peoria,... Read more
A variety of Hebrew words are used for “covering.” The seraphim cover ( kasah ) their eyes, hands, and feet with wings, while the wings of the cherubim cover ( sakak ) the ark (Exodus 25:20), Yahweh’s hand covers ( sakak ) Moses as His glory goes by (Exodus 33:22), and Yahweh’s wings cover ( sakak ) those who take refuge in Him (Psalm 91:4). Inaddition, Hebrew uses forms of kaphar to describe various literal and metaphorical “coverings.” Despite the... Read more
One of the cruxes of the structure of Isaiah is the question of why Isaiah’s call and commission occurs in chapter 6 rather than, as in most of the prophets, at the beginning of the book. There is some resemblance between Isaiah and John in this respect, but John is commissioned as a prophet before the end of Revelation 1. One of the reasons for this oddity, I think, is that Isaiah is constructed so that the opening section, chapters... Read more
The numbers are numbing. All the quotations below are from Walter Russell Mead. “In the last five months of World War II, American bombing raised killed more than 900,000 Japanese civilians, not counting the casualties from the atomic strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is more than twice the total number of combat deaths (441,513) the United States has suffered in all its foreign wars combined.” The nuclear attacks killed over 127,000 Japanese, nearly thirty percent of the total number... Read more
Without American missionaries, no Transcendentalism, says Mead (almost): “Missionary endeavors to translate the sacred writings of other faiths into English may have been for the purposes of arming Westerners for religious controversy with the heathens, but the ideas of those texts quickly found a place in American thought. Emerson and Thoreau read Hindu scriptures, and their thought, and the development of American intellectual life, was deeply influenced by these ideas.” Read more
Mead again: “After [World War II], General MacArthur’s reconstruction of Japan was essentially an implementation of the missionary program at the point of bayonets. The traditional ruler gave up his claim to divinity; freedom of religion was established; feudalism was abolished and land distributed to the peasants; women were emancipated; a Western, democratic system of government was introduced; freedom of the press was granted; trade unions were legalized, and war was outlawed. Without the long missionary experience Americans would have... Read more
In a Mars Hill Audio interview, Ellen Charry observes that the Protestant theologians of the seventeenth century, even before the Enlightenment, had a tendency to detach truth from historical reference. The truth of theology was seen in the coherence of the system of truth found in Scripture, rather than a truth of reference to historical events. Charry’s comment was a passing one, no doubt a drastic oversimplification. Protestant scholastics, after all, defended the historical reliability of Scripture as well as... Read more
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