A. N. S. Lane summarizes some themes of Barth’s treatment of the virgin birth: “Barth saw in the virgin birth the expression of a wider truth that is fundamental to his theology. It shows that ‘human nature possesses no capacity for becoming the human nature of Jesus Christ, the place of divine revelation’. While it does become his nature, this is not because of any attributes that it already possesses but rather because of what it suffers and receives at the hand of God.... Read more
Song of Songs 2:16a: “My beloved is mine, and I am his”; 6:3a: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”; 7:10: “I am my beloved’s and his desire is for me.” Let us pray Almighty God, our Father: You dwell in an eternal fellowship of love with your Son and Spirit, and in Your grace You have created and redeemed us so that we might share in that communion. Before the foundation of the world, You chose us... Read more
PROVERBS 28:9 Again Solomon speaks of our attitude toward torah . The central command of the law was a command to “hear” (Deuteronomy 6). It was a command addressed to the ear. We are to have open ears (Psalm 40; Isaiah 50:5) so that we can obey His commandments. The connection between hearing and obeying is so close that sometimes the Bible uses the verb “hear” as a synonym for “obey.” Not hearing is disobedience; eventually, Israel is sent into... Read more
Robert Sokolowski ( Phenomenology of the Human Person ) finds contemporary talk about “the self” extraordinary: “How odd it is, even gramatically, to speak of ‘the self.’ The linguistic strangeness of the term the self is matched by the oddity of the terms the ego and the I , which are often used as its synonyms. Under what normal circumstances would we ever refer to ‘the I’? Why have we not contrived to speak of ‘the he’ or ‘the she’... Read more
From Lewis Carroll, quoted in Robin Wilson’s delightful Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life : From his shoulder Hiawatha Took the camera of rosewood, Made of sliding, folding rosewood; Neatly put it all together. In its case it lay compactly, Folded into nearly nothing; But he opened out the hinges, Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges, Till it looked all squares and oblongs, Like a complicated figure In the Second Book of Euclid. (more…) Read more
McIntosh quotes this passage from Barth, saying that this reflects “the very heart of Barth’s understanding of the Gospel”: “In the beginning, before time and space as we know them, before creation, before there was any reality distinct from God which could be the object of the love of God or the setting for His acts of freedom, God anticipated and determined within Himself . . . that that the goal and meaning of all His dealings with the as... Read more
Mark McIntosh ( Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology (Blackwell Guides to Theology) ) points out that the most dramatic and clearest revelation of the Trinity in the gospel story occurs at the beginning, in Jesus’ baptism: “It is precisely as he unites himself with the people in their longing and need that Jesus is depicted as sensing fully his identity as God’s beloved. It is then that the gospels describe him as being marked externally by an outpouring... Read more
Herbert McCabe writes: “If [Jesus] had wanted something less than the kingdom, if he had been a lesser man, a man not obsessed by love he might have settled for less and achieved it by his own personality, intelligence, and skill. But he wanted that all men should be as possessed by love as he was, he wanted that they should be divine, and this could only come as gift. Crucifixion and resurrection, the prayer of Christ and the response... Read more
Who is being described: “a man of abnormally emotional temperament, with a solicitous goddess for a mother and a comrade to whom he is devoted,” who “is devastated by the latter’s death and plunges into a new course of action in an unbalanced state of mind, eventually to recover his equilibrium.” Through his experience, he is “brought face to face with issues of life and death, railing against mortality but coming to understand and accept it.” Achilles? Yes, but as... Read more
A proposal, not a settled conclusion. The problem is passibility. For most Christian theologians, God is by definition impassible, not subject to passions nor passive in relation to His creation. Recently, of course, many theologians have challenged this, sometimes at the expense of God’s Godness and Lordship. But you’ve got to admit they have a point. Yahweh is a fairly passionate God, and Jesus the God-man expresses emotion and suffers. The tradition has ways of dealing with these things... Read more
Leithart
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