Karant-Nunn again, remarking on the hierarchy among the saints that was embodied in certain Protestant eucharistic practices: “The Lord’s Supper itself was not only administered within this ranks milieu but it also set apart, usually as a small group, those who communed. In Lutheran congregations, which . . . kept auricular confession, the few who gained admission to the Lord’s Table sat in the choir and remained there until the end of the service. They were singled out and visible... Read more
In her The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany , Susan Karant-Nunn argues that the Reformation churches ended with a more rigid hierarchy than the medieval church: “The fluid atmosphere inside the late medieval sanctuary, in which people milled about and set up portable seats at the foot of the pulpit or pressed forward to witness transubstantiation, gave way during and after the Reformation to a far more rigorously striated and controlled ritual environment.” A main culprit... Read more
Brian Brock begins his Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture by noting how foreign Augustine found the Bible. Brock doesn’t want to familiarize the Bible: “It is as strange and eternally different from our common sense as is Christ himself.” There is no “exegetical or devotional method [that] can overcome God’s proper otherness . . . . God is not foreign to us on some general criterion, but as another person . .... Read more
Poitier-Young emphasizes that Antiochus IV’s plundering of the temple was not merely utilitarian but symbolic. He removed the lampstand, “a symbol and assurance of God’s sustaining presence,” and thus effected “a symbolic de-creation.” Likewise, taking out the curtain that divided the temple. Division is a key component of the ordered creation in Genesis 1, and by removing the curtain that served as “a symbol of God’s ordering of the gosmos, marking in space the divisions between what was profane, what... Read more
From Notes from Underground : “Man loves creating and the making of roads, that is indisputable. But why does he so passionately love destruction and chaos as well? Tell me that! . . . Can it be that he has such a love of destruction and chaos . . . because he is instinctively afraid of achieving the goal and completing the edifice he is creating? How do you know, maybe he likes the edifice only from far off, and... Read more
A genealogy of ideas worth pondering: English utilitarians formulate a theory of “enlightened self-interest” as a guide for human and social action. Inspired by the utilitarians, Chernyshevsky formulates his “rationali egoism,” embodied in his novel What Is To Be Done? Chernyshevsky in his turn inspired Lenin. Of course, the transmission of ideas is complicated by all sorts of other factors, but the continuity is noteworthy. Read more
Portier-Young notes that during the Ptolemaic domination of Palesting, “some families were taken captive and enslaved.” She cites Hengel, who claims that the slave trade flourished under the Ptolemies. Josephus claims that “soldiers sold slaves independently of imperial policy as a way to increase their profits from campaigning.” Another scholar notes that “The Ptolemies used their Syrian wars to make vast hauls of captives whom they then imprisoned to augment their military or working manpower,” and Portier-Young adds that the... Read more
Josephus ( Antiquities 12) cites this intriguing decree ( programma ) from Antiochus III: “It shall be lawful for no foreigner to come within the limits of the temple round about; which thing is forbidden also to the Jews, unless to those who, according to their own custom, have purified themselves. Nor let any flesh of horses, or of mules, or of asses, he brought into the city, whether they be wild or tame; nor that of leopards, or foxes,... Read more
Matt Petersen sends along the following excerpt from Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Creation of Man, ch. 8, concerning hands: “1. But man’s form is upright, and extends aloft towards heaven, and looks upwards: and these are marks of sovereignty which show his royal dignity. For the fact that man alone among existing things is such as this, while all others bow their bodies downwards, clearly points to the difference of dignity between those which stoop beneath his sway and... Read more
Paul uses the verb “eagerly await” a number of times. What is he waiting for? He awaits the Savior from heaven (Philippians 3:20), the apocalypse of the Lord Jesus (1 Corinthians 1:7), the revelation of the sons of God (Romans 8:19), the adoption of sons and redemption of the body (8:23). The author of Hebrews says that we eagerly await Jesus to appear a second time (9:28). When Jesus comes, at the apocalypse of Jesus, secret sins will be revealed,... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In