David Dorsey points out that Song of Songs 2:11-13 contains seven descriptions of spring and seven imperatives. Sevens make me think of the creation week: Spring is new creation. But can we fill that out in more detail? Verse 11a says that winter is past. Winter is darkness. Spring says, Let there be light. Verse 11b says that the rain is over. Waters above have stopped falling. Day 2. (more…) Read more
God is identified “by” and “with” temporal events, Jenson argues. What can we make of that? Perhaps this: Yahweh is compassionate, slow to anger, in the Hebrew idiom “long of nose.” He is kind to the weak, generous to the needy. These are all biblical descriptions of God that describe Him in relation to creation. What can we say about these? (more…) Read more
As you’ll notice in the icon to the right, my commentary on 1-3 John is now available on Amazon. Read more
Yahweh’s nose burns a lot. You can’t see it in English translation, but that’s what the Hebrew says whenever Yahweh’s “anger” burns: What’s actually burning is His nose. His nose burns first, though, not at Israel but at Moses. Exodus 4:14 is the first use of the idiom in the Hebrew Bible, and there Yahweh’s nose is burning at the mediator. In this, as in so many other ways, Moses’ personal history anticipates Israel’s communal history, for later, also at... Read more
Human beings are clay shaped by the Almighty Potter. So are events. Isaiah says that long before the events happened the Lord “fashioned-like-a-potter” the Assyrian invasion and devastation of city and country in Israel and Judah (Isaiah 37:26). If the Lord is a potter fashioning events, those events are presumably His “art.” Read more
Isaiah 2:12-22 warns of a day when Yahweh will cast down the tall trees and high mountains, the proud men, and the idols. The passage ends with a warning not to esteem man who has breath in his nose. This last is often taken as a reference to the frailty and weakness of man, who should not be feared. The language is more specific. “Man” is adam , and the references to breath and nose take us back to Genesis... Read more
Nietzsche nails the issue in the section of Twilight of the Idols on “reason” in philosophy. Philosophy kills and mummifies in order to analyze. Philosophy especially wants to rid itself of the body: “You ask me which of the philosophers’ traits are most characteristic? For example, their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egypticism. They think that they show their respect for a subject when they dehistoricize it sub specie aeternitas — when... Read more
Descartes (Second Meditation) considers a piece of wax that, when heated, changes its properties yet remains wax. He concludes that the “wax” must not be accessible to the senses, since sensible properties all change but the wax remains: “what was there in the wax that was so distinctly grasped? Certainly none of the aspects that I reached by means of the senses. For whatever came under the senses of taste, smell, sight, touch or hearing has now changed; and yet the... Read more
Margaret Visser has done it again. Author of The Rituals of Dinner , and The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church , she has now added The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude , an anthropological and philosophical study of gratitude, an examination of the gestures and rituals of thanks. Her latest is the book I’ve been hoping to write someday; now that Visser’s done it, why bother? Visser recognizes that,... Read more
Robert Jenson writes, “In that an eternity is always some union of past and future, every possible eternity will be of one of two broad kinds: a Persistence of the Beginning, or an Anticipation of the End. Moreover, essential time is future time. It is because we face a future that we experience ourselves as temporal beings; if there were only the past, which remains forever as it is, we would be timeless. The eternity in which all persists as... Read more
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