When Sheba visits Solomon, she brings spices. 1 Kings 10 uses the word besem four times (vv. 2, 10 [2x], 25), suggesting that the spices come from the four points of the compass. Spices are exotic in Israel, a sign of the Gentiles flowing to the mountain of God. What were the spices used for? Kings doesn’t tell us, but from the information in Exodus and Chronicles, spices were used for temple service – added to the anointing oil for... Read more
John Paul II offers a profound and subtle analysis of the the sources of sexual deviance in his theology of the body. The steps are: 1. Lust is a disorder of the spirit, and breaks the natural bond between body and soul. Men no longer act as single simple beings, their bodily actions an expression of a person. 2. This is linked to shame. Due to the breakdown of the unity of spirit and body, human beings lose the confidence... Read more
Given that so much evangelical energy is spend defending “objectivity” and “objective truth” against postmodern subjectivism, it’s striking to turn to John Paul II and find him placing the emphasis on precisely the opposite side of things. For John Paul, the great need of the church in the modern world is not to defend the objectivity of truth, but to defend the freedom, personality, subjectivity, and intentionality of human action. Sexuality, specifically, cannot be reduced to “drives” and animal instincts;... Read more
INTRODUCTION Who was tried by Pontius Pilate, tortured, and crucified? All the heretics denied it, but Christian orthodoxy has always said that, impossible as it seems, the One who suffered on the cross was none other than God the Son in human flesh. THE TEXT “When morning came, all the chief priests and elders of the people plotted against Jesus to put Him to death. And when they had bound Him, they led Him away and delivered Him to Pontius... Read more
1 Peter 5:14: Greet one another with a kiss of love. We have said it often before, but it bears repeating: The command to greet one another with a kiss is one of the most frequently repeated commands of Scripture. Paul says it at the end of Romans, and then at the end of 1 Corinthians, and 2 Corinthians, and 1 Thessalonians, and now Peter at the end of his first letter. (more…) Read more
Peter closes his first letter with exhortations to two generations within his churches. He exhorts the elders who lead the church to shepherd the flock not as lords but as examples, following the Chief Shepherd, Jesus Christ. To the younger people, he says “submit yourselves to your elders.” For Peter and for all the apostles, there is an order to the church. As the family, so the church: There are leaders and there are followers. (more…) Read more
Deleuze and Guattari chide Lacan for assuming, with most of the Western philosophical tradition, that desire expresses a lack. They suggest instead that desire is productive, that we are “desiring machines.” Why would everyone think that desire expresses lack? Calvin would say it comes from a confusion of the present state of man with the original state, the assumption that fallen human beings straightforwardly point to the character of human nature as such. John Paul agrees. Far from being part... Read more
John Paul II argues from Genesis 1-2 that the human body is a “sacrament” of humanity’s status as image of God. It is the visible manifestation of the invisible truth, and it is a source of assurance How could Adam know he was image? It was his body, “the visible factor of transcendence, in virtue of which man, as person, surpasses the visible world of living beings.” But in sin, this is precisely what man loses. He is estranged from... Read more
In his recent book on Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (Making of the Christian Imagination) , Rowan Williams notes Dostoevsky’s “diagnosis of the pathology of fantasies of absolute freedom” that he likens to those of Hegel’s Phenomenology : “‘the freedom of the void’ is the dream of a liberty completely without constraint from any other, human, subhuman or divine; because it has no ‘other,’ it can also have no content. But this means that the hunger for such freedom can... Read more
Jenson, again in the Song of Songs commentary, arrestingly described beauty as “realized eschatology.” He begins, of all places, with Kant. For Kant beauty is “the unlaborious coincidence of the actual and the ideal, the way in which some things show forth what they ought to be by what they serendipitously are, and insofar do not need to be improved by our moral efforts.” Translated to theology, this means that beauty is “realized eschatology, the present glow of the sheer... Read more
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