Late medieval theologians were divided, we’re told, between intellectualists and voluntarists. The first took God’s intellect to be “prior” to His will, and believed His will conforms to His reason. The latter put the will in the place of “priority” and said that God’s intellect is as it is because He wills it to be so. It’s a sterile debate, and misses what the Bible places in the position of “priority”: Neither reason nor will but Word. Read more
Dionysus said that creation is the overflow of the superabundant love of God. That’s true: Many waters cannot quench Yahweh’s fiery love. That love is the flame of the Spirit, the uncreated Flash that flickers over the formless earth and is not put out but instead moves water here and there as it will. Recreation too: The fiery windy Spirit-dove reappears to Noah, and parts the waters again. Read more
Yahweh speaks with the voice of many waters, and so does Jesus. That means loud, but it also means that the voice is the source of life (cf. Numbers 20:11; 24:7; Ezekiel 17:5), like the abundant waters in the wilderness. Many waters cannot quench the flame of Love. That is, no competing voice can drown Yahweh’s, no alternative source of life can provide. No idol like Rashaph (= fire-bolt, a Canaanite deity) or Mot (= death) can triumph over the... Read more
“Set me as a seal upon your heart,” says the Bride to the Bridegroom. Now the priest wore stones with the names of the tribes “engraven like a seal” on his breastplate (Exodus 28:11, 21) and the name of Yahweh, also “engraven like a seal” on the golden plate on his head (Exodus 28:36). The stones were attached to the breastplate so that the names of the sons of Israel would be “upon his heart” as he entered the Holy... Read more
Erik Peterson ( Das Buch von den Engeln ) points out that the new song of Revelation 5 is sung by people from every tongue and nation and people. Thus, “the hymn of the church is the transcending of all national hymns, as the speech of the church is the transcending of all speech.” The reason for is is that the “victory of the lion from Judah has transcended the victory of all kings of the earth and therefore made... Read more
Hegel’s “sublation” seems to be a conceptual vestige of perichoresis. Sublation requires the Trinity: If all is one, nothing other can be absorbed within being destroyed. If we have sheer differentiation, all is utterly other. Hegel is right: Sublation happens. Aquinas does absorb Aristotle, so that Aristotle is still recognizably there even though he’s been sublated into a new system. Marx does the same to Hegel. Shall we say too that the New Testament does the same to the Old.... Read more
INTRODUCTION The Song of Songs is a love poem, but both Jewish and Christian readers have discerned that it’s something more than that. Ultimately, the Song is nothing less than the gospel. THE TEXT “Put me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm for love is as strong as death, jealousy is as severe as Sheol; its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the LORD. Many waters cannot quench love, nor will rivers... Read more
All history, Hegel says, is the death and resurrection of Jesus, the God’s embrace of negativity and death and their sublation in the resurrection. This movement of incarnation, death, and death-nestled-in-resurrection is, moreover, the pattern of thought. As Hegel says, “‘God himself is dead,’ it says in a Lutheran hymn, expressing an awareness that the human, the finite, the weak, the negative, are themselves a moment of the divine, that they are within God himself, that finitude, negativity, otherness are... Read more
From an article by Anselm Min. “The three Persons are thus mutually internal in the unity and totality of the divine process, of which the Father is the originating principle, the Son the pluralizing, and the Spirit the reintegrating and unifying principle, and from which none could be separately considered. The distinction of Persons is thoroughly relative to the self-unifying totality of this divine process of which they are moments. This, however, must not be understood in modalistic fashion, in... Read more
Robert Jenson writes, “the identity of Israel’s God, his difference from other gods, is precisely that Israel’s God is not eternal in the way other gods are, not God in the same way. That the past guarantees the future is exactly the deity of the gods, but Yahweh always challenges the past and everything guaranteed by it [including, Jenson points out, the past of His own people], from a future that is freedom . . . . Yahweh is eternal... Read more
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