Theologians have long been fascinated by the way iron takes on the properties of fire, and have used the analogy for all sorts of things. Luther said that the Word confers its qualities to the soul He indwells as the fire confers heat to iron; some church fathers use the iron in the fire as a Christological analogy; it’s been used as a Eucharistic analogy too. Cyril of Alexandria uses it as a way to explain the passibility of the... Read more
The heart of Heidegger’s critique of the technological society is his notion of “standing reserve,” the idea that matter is just there, without an inherent order or qualities, plastic to whatever shapes the whims of human will want to impose on it. He says, “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering . . . The word ‘standing-reserve’ assumes the... Read more
It’s obvious that, in Heidegger’s terms, human art remake earth -stone is remade into sculpture, the components of paint into a scene or a portrait. Heidegger also insists that art remakes world, reshapes the human environment by redrawing boundaries of earth and world. Heidegger appeals to the example of a Greek temple: “A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley. The building encloses the figure of the god, and in... Read more
In his essay on the “Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger attacks the traditional metaphysics of form and matter. There is no formless matter, he insists, and human beings must take account of the particular forms in which matter comes to us in order to make use of it. The essential distinction is instead between “earth” and “wworld,” the first referring to material reality with all its preexisting qualities and the latter to the humanly constructed. Between earth and... Read more
Brian Brock writes of Heidegger’s essay on “Nietzsche’s Word”: “The concept of ‘art’ as a replacement for Descartes’s ‘certainty’ attracts Heidegger not least because a public and social horizon is built into it: truth grows from an insight into being made public in a way that claims others.” That is, in contrast to Descartes, for whom truth arises from what is within, Heidegger employs a secular “Protestant” notion of a verbum ex auditu , the external claim that confronts the... Read more
From the Russian mystic Nikolay Fydorov: “The task of the fathers, the parents, ends with the upbringing of the children; then begins the task of the sons, who restore life. In giving birth to and raising their children, the parents give life to them, while the task of resurrection belongs wih the returning of life to the parents.” Because God is triune. Hence too Freud and Dostoevsky are right: Parricide is the story of humanity. Read more
Exodus 17:5-6: And the LORD said to Moses, “Go on before the people, and take with you some of the elders of Israel. Also take in your hand your rod with which you struck the river, and go. Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock in Horeb; and you shall strike the rock, and water will come out of it that the people may drink.” Israel comes to a place called Rephidim, which means “rests” or “resting... Read more
On New Year’s Eve, an Egyptian Muslim blew himself up outside a Coptic church in Alexandria, killing 25 Christians and injuring 90 others. At the end of January this year, eleven Christians were killed in a massacre in the village of Sharona. These were only two of many attacks on Coptic Christians in Egypt during the past year. Copts make up about 10% of the Egyptian population, though that percentage has been cut in half over the last century. They... Read more
In her Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel , Lee Palmer Wandel shows that images in medieval Christianity were modes of God’s presence. In attacking images, Protestant iconoclasts were acting on an alternative understanding of that presence: “For the iconoclasts, what was ‘present’ through all the images in the churches made them ‘idols.’ With their acts, they invoked ways in which Christ was indeed present: in the practice of Christian brotherly love, in the... Read more
Why did Luther react so violently to Zwingli on the one hand and the Anabaptists on the other? He wasn’t because he insisted on his own formula for the real presence or baptism. As Jaroslav Pelikan pointed out in his 1968 Spirit versus Strcuture , “when Luther was confronted with a position that was less precise than his own about the real presence in the eucharist, but was no less firm than his about the doctrine of grace, he was... Read more
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