The Sanhedrin condemns Jesus for claiming that He was able to destroy the temple and rebuild it. To them, that was equivalent to claiming God’s power, and had to be blasphemy. Surely Jesus didn’t have that kind of power – never mind that He had spent several years very publicly giving sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and raising the dead. But there’s a deeper trial going on. The God of Israel comes to Israel, and Israel puts... Read more
Athanasius argues: The Son assumed flesh, and its terrors, especially the terror of death. The goal was to overcome death and terror, but the Son did this by suffering those terrors Himself. We will be delivered from death, and not just in the future. Athanasius points to martyrs to demonstrate that life is already victorious over death: “from that most enduring purpose and courage of the Holy Martyrs is shown, that theGodhead was not in terror, but the Saviour took away our terror.” Life is already triumphing... Read more
PROVERBS 28:4 Law ( torah ) is mentioned about a dozen times in Proverbs. Most of the uses refer to the torah of a mother (1:8) or a father (3:1), and in these uses the emphasis is on the fact that torah is “instruction” rather than strictly “law” in our sense of the term. The word is used four times in a few verses of Proverbs 28 (vv. 4, 7, 9), and here the referent is the torah of Israel,... Read more
Discussing Barth’s distinction of the “church of Esau” and the “church of Jacob” in the Romerbrief , Michael Horton ( People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology ) gets Barth’s weaknesses exactly right. First, “Barth seems to assume that ‘secularity’ is neutral, objective, descriptive science” and second “Barth can only place the visible-historical form of the church on the ‘secular’ side of the ledger upon the presupposition that God works and the church works, but these parallel tracks do not intersect,... Read more
Kinneging points out the ambiguous relationship that traditional conservatism has often had with the market: “No conservative will deny that a system of mutual provision of services, based on a range of evil affects residing within man – which are further inflamed by the unrestricted operation of that system – ‘works,’ in the sense that it maximized utility. Unlike critics from the left, conservatives do not believe that the market fails when measured by its own standard of success: utility... Read more
In The Geography of Good and Evil: Philosophical Investigations (Crosscurrents) , Dutch philosopher Andreas Kinneging argues that the conservative objection to the Enlightenment is not only intellectual but has to do with the will: “It is the view of conation that characterizes conservatism more than anything else.” That view is “that man is by nature inclined to evil” or “encumbered with original sin.” I’m with him so far, but then: The daily battle with our inherent evil “is an unequal... Read more
The eternal Word, being proper to the Father’s being, cannot advance. Yet, Scripture says that Jesus advances in wisdom and stature. Athanasius appeals to the incarnation: He is advancing humanly. But, as always, what the Word does in the flesh is done for us: “Neither then was the advance the Word’s, nor was the flesh Wisdom, but the flesh became the body of Wisdom ( tes sophias soma gegonen he sarx ). Therefore, as we have already said, not Wisdom, as Wisdom, advanced... Read more
Peter describes women as “weaker vessels” (1 Pet 3:7). That sounds like an insult. Is it? First, vessels in Scripture are almost always temple vessels, implements of temple worship. Hebrew 9:21 is one of the NT passages that uses the word in this specific sense. Other uses in the NT are derived from it. In the OT, vessels represent Israel devoted to the worship of Yahweh; when Israel goes into exile, so do the “vessels” and the vessels also return... Read more
In a couple earlier posts, I’ve commented on the “intrinsicism” in Athanasius. One additional point: Rather than seeing intrinstic/extrinsic as metaphysical opposites, Athanasius’ sees the question in a redemptive-historical, eschatological framework. Extrinsicism is the order of the old, intrinsicism, because of the incarnation, is the order of the new. That seems to work: Under the old, God was veiled, “incarnate” in a temple; He wrote on objectified tablets of stone. In the new, He comes to look us in the... Read more
Athanasius employs much of the same language and makes some of the same conceptual moves in talking about the Son’s relation to the Father on the one hand and the Son’s incarnation in the flesh on the other. The Son is “proper to” the Father’s essence; so too the flesh of the Son to the Son. The Son is the Father’s very own Word and Wisdom; so too the Son’s flesh is His very own. The Son is not “alien”... Read more
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Leithart
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