What is the thrust of the argument in Romans 4? Is Paul mainly concerned to present Abraham as an example of individual belief and trust in God? Or is the argument mainly about Abraham as father of both Jews and Gentiles? Is Abraham’s faith presented as the means by which he receives right standing with God, and so will be saved at the final judgment? Or is his faith presented as the means by which he becomes the father of nations?... Read more
Columbia Law School professor Philip Hamburger’s The Administrative Threat makes a powerful case that the executive branch has assumed “absolute power,” albeit in a “soft” form. It is entirely unConstitutional. Through its administrative bureaucracy, the executive branch has taken on the power to create “legal obligation—the obligation to obey” (3). Americans have long assumed that “a rule could have the obligation of law only if it came from the constitutionally established legislature elected by the people” and that judicial power could... Read more
Attacked by his enemies, David cries out, asking God to judge. He prays for favorable judgment for himself, or, in Pauline terminology, for justification. In the Psalms, justification is a drama that has a consistent shape—threat, anguished protest and prayer, God’s intervention, rescue and punishment, rejoicing. I have examined Psalms 7 and 35 at length in an essay in The Federal Vision, but I don’t emphasize the narrative dimension of justification in that essay. Here are a few Psalms that display... Read more
From Whitman’s Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass: The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth, have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night.... Read more
Like many Americans, I’ve spent an inordinate proportion of the past two years thinking about Donald Trump. I’ve written more about the 2016 Presidential election than about any other political event in my lifetime. Recently, someone said he thought I was a Trump supporter. That surprised me, but on reflection it’s understandable. My writing on Trump has been fragmentary, and probably inconsistent at a number of points. This essay is an effort to sum up Trump, so far. Many have reduced... Read more
In what context does “justification” fit? Does the word describe what happens to sinners when they are restored to the favor of God in their individual experience? Or is it instead, or also, a description of something that happened in the life-history of Jesus, as He lives a life of perfect devotion to His Father, dies, and rises again? Historically, theologians have taken the former context as the primary one for Paul’s teaching on justification. For Augustine and most of the... Read more
Stephen Greenblatt writes in The New Yorker about “How St. Augustine Invented Sex.” How typical of The New Yorker, a cynic might say—interested in the greatest theologian in the Western tradition only because he said something titillating. But it doesn’t take much reading of Augustine to realize that Greenblatt is right to focus his attention here. Augustine’s anxieties and bewilderments about sex were integral to the development of his theology. Greenblatt covers familiar ground in Augustine’s sexual biography (his father’s embarrassing... Read more
In the course of reviewing Philippe Desan’s Montaigne: A Life, Jane Kramer speculates on the fraught question of Montaigne’s influence on Shakespeare. Such influence is historically plausible: “Although Florio’s 1603 effort was the first English rendering of Montaigne’s essays to appear in book form, they had certainly been circulating in manuscript before that.” And Kramer “finds it impossible to imagine that Shakespeare had not absorbed Montaigne fully, and decisively, right around 1600.” Comparisons are always controvertible, but Kramer gives some... Read more
My son Woelke sent this along, from Louis Menand: The real basis for the metaphor of voice in writing is not speaking. It is singing. You cannot know a singer from her speech, and although ‘natural phrasing’ and ‘from the heart’ are prized attributes of song, actually singing that way requires rehearsal, preparation, and getting in touch with whatever it is inside singers that, by a neural kink or the grace of God, enables them to turn themselves into vessels of... Read more
Reflecting on the retirement of actor Daniel Day-Lewis at Variety, Owen Gleiberman suggests that “What retired . . . is something that’s waning in the culture: the belief in acting as a highly sculpted soul transplant—as the mystical spirit of inhabitation.” He fills out the point by situating Day-Lewis within two 20th-century traditions of acting. Working on the first theory. Lawrence Olivier “built his characters from the outside in, manipulating his look, his voice, his posture, his gestures. Playing his own face... Read more
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