INTRODUCTION Isaiah 8 ends with Judah stumbling into the darkness of exile. But Isaiah and his “children” have been delivered from the “way of the people” (8:11, 18). For them, light dawns. THE TEXT “Nevertheless the gloom will not be upon her who is distressed, as when at first He lightly esteemed the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, and afterward more heavily oppressed her, by the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, in Galilee of the... Read more
In the Bible, holy things and holy places are measured out. Measuring is an act of consecrating, of dividing holy from common. In Ezekiel 47, the water that flows from the temple is measured. That can only mean it is holy water, and not just holy but sanctifying. Read more
Jesus is presented as the “metal man” (James Jordan’s phrase) in His first unveiling in Revelation 1. The imperial statue of Daniel 2 is in the background, the statue that reverts from glorified metal back to dust when the kingdom of God hits it in the feet. Jesus is the metal man; later, the beast is the composite of beasts from Daniel 7. Jesus is the true empire, greater Cyrus; the beast is a false imperial power. That connection suggests... Read more
Rowan Williams and others have attempted to blunt the force of Paul’s condemnation of homosexual relations in Romans 1 by working backward through the passage. It becomes clear at the end of the passage that the disorder that Paul condemns is a failure to pursue the love and righteousness that God has exhibited in Jesus. For Paul, same-sex relations show disordered desires, and in his historical context he was quite right: Homosexual relations were relations of dominance and abuse. But... Read more
So far as I have been able to find, the Westminster Confession never once uses the distinction of law and gospel as many theologians today use it, as a distinction between two “principles” of life. Nor does it introduce this distinction to describe the difference between the Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace. Rather, where the distinction appears, it refers to the distinction between the age of the law and the age of the gospel. To be “under... Read more
Why can’t we just close off the border with Mexico? William Cavanaugh suggests a cynical explanation: We don’t want to, because they serve an essential purpose. A porous border does what neither an open border nor a closed border can do. Closed borders would keep out the laborers we need to keep some industries running efficiently. Opening the border would give migrants stability and rights, and make them less controllable. By maintaining some control, but not so much, we get... Read more
Watch the gyrovagi, Benedict says in the first chapter of his Rule . You know the type: “wanderers, who travel about all their lives through divers provinces, and stay for two or three days as guests, first in one monastery, then in another; they are always roving, and never settled, giving themselves up altogether to their own pleasures and to the enticements of gluttony, and are in all things worse that the Sarabites. Of their miserable way of life it... Read more
Commenting on Isaiah 60:17, Cyril of Alexandria describes the alchemical transformation that Christ brings: “all things are to be transformed to something better in order to distinguish the first [dispensation] from the second. The paideia of the law will certainly end with the paideia of Christ – that is, in the evangelical oracles -p and the difference will be as great as that between gold and bronze. For bronze has the look of gold but is not gold, and iron... Read more
A “Well, duh” moment. Yahweh regularly charges Israel with harlotry. This is not just serial adultery, though it is that. It is also commercialization. Yahweh loves His bride and calls her to intimate love. She wants to buy him off with sacrifices and trinkets. Read more
In his latest book ( Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church ), William Cavanaugh offers an intriguing analysis of the liturgy of war memorials. Drawing on Marvin and Ingle’s Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies) , he notes that the celebrations of heroic sacrificial patriots “can never really reproduce the bodily sacrifice” that they commemorate: “Thus, D-Day celebrations were marked by guilt that the... Read more
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