Paul ends 1 Corinthians (16:22) with a neat chiastic sign-off. Anyone who does not love the Lord is declared “accursed” ( anathema ) and Paul follows this with the cry of maranatha (“the Lord comes”). Anath-ma/mar-anatha . Substantively, it is a striking phrase. Anathema speaks a harsh word of judgment; maranatha is, as it were, the Bride’s cry for her Lord to come (cf. Revelation 22:17-20). It is, as it were, the last word of the Song of Songs... Read more
In his superb introduction to the New City Press edition of Augustine’s de Trinitate ( Trinity, The (Works of Saint Augustine A Translation for the 21st Century) ), Edmund Hill offers a chiastic outline of the treatise: 1. Introduction, 1 2. Divine missions: exegetical, 2-4 3. Trinitarian language: philosophical, 5-7 4. Modo interiore , 8 3’. Psychological analogies: philosophical, 9-11 2’. Disorder and redemption of image: exegetical, 12-14 1’. Conclusion, 15 Read more
In Epistle 11, Augustine attempts to explain an apparent contradiction in the Catholic faith. On the one hand, all of God does all that God does, since the Persons of the Trinity are inseparable and act inseparably: “For the union of Persons in the Trinity is in the Catholic faith set forth and believed, and by a few holy and blessed ones understood, to be so inseparable, that whatever is done by the Trinity must be regarded as being done by the Father, and by the Son, and by the... Read more
David Garland comments that the first part of Matthew’s Passion narrative (26:2-56) begins with the plot of the priests and elders and then is divided into six scenes: 1. Anointing for burial, 26:6-13 2. Judas’ betrayal, 26:14-15 3. Preparation for Passover, 26:17-19 4. Last Supper, 26:20-30 5. Prediction that the disciples will scatter, 26:31-35 6. Prayer in Gethesemane, 26:36-46 These scenes set out a creation-week sequence. (more…) Read more
INTRODUCTION After the Olivet Discourse, Jesus “finished all these words” (26:1; cf. 7:28; 11:1; 13:53; 19:1). His public ministry of teaching Israel is over. Like Moses (Deuteronomy 32:45), nothing remains for Him but to die. THE TEXT “Now it came to pass, when Jesus had finished all these sayings, that He said to His disciples, ‘You know that after two days is the Passover, and the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified.’ . . . ”... Read more
Protestants agreed with Catholics that the Song elaborates a nuptial analogy to the church’s relation to Christ, but Scheper finds a significant difference between Protestants and Catholics when they explain why that analogy is apt in the first place. Protestants, consistent with the emphasis on legal categories for justification and with a quasi-legal understanding of covenant, tend to revert to legal, domestic, and moral concerns, while medievals elaborate on passions and senses: They are moreover agreed that the nuptial metaphor... Read more
The Puritans were not prudes, but the caricature has some basis in fact. Again the Song of Songs provides a neat barometer. Scheper juxtaposes a medieval monk’s interpretation of the “breasts” of the Song with that of two Protestant interpreters. The results are fascinating: “the Cistercian monk Gilbert of Hoilandia does in explicating the praise of the bride’s breasts: ‘Those breasts are beautiful which rise up a little and swell moderately, neither too elevated, nor, indeed, level with the rest of the chest. They are... Read more
the Protestant commentaries almost uniformly adopt a primarily ecclesial allegory, with the tropological dimension as a valid application. But so, in fact, is the medieval tradition built on the foundation of the ecclesial interpretation, and even those commentaries devoted most strikingly to the Christsoul allegory, such as Bernard’s, recognize that the ultimate priority remains with the ecclesial interpretation. Similarly, the Protestant commentaries deplored the mechanical allegorization of every particular detail in the scholastic, dialectical commentaries, but so do Origen and... Read more
The modern oblivion of the book has tended to blind us to the really crucial position it holds in exegetic history, not only for the question of allegory but for the central matter of the relation of divine to profane love, and in fact, as Ruth Wallerstein has said, the Song involved for the Middle Ages and Renaissance the whole question of the place of the senses in the spiritual life and helped “to shape man’s ideas of symbolism and... Read more
there is a certain discrepancy between the purity of these theoretical statements, polemical in context, and the actual exegetic practice of the Reformers. Moreover, the rejection of allegory and the insistence on one undivided sense hinged for the early Reformers on maintaining a radical distinction between typology and allegory. But the more systematic Protestant hermeneutic treatises reveal, as Madsen has shown, that any essential distinction was impossible to maintain. For instance, Flacius Illyricus at first tried to fix the difference... Read more
Leithart
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