Is the church a polis herself? Or a replacement for the pagan cults at the heart of the ancient polis? There might be another way to say it. Erik Peterson ( Das Buch von den Engeln , 1935) points to the NT language about a heavenly Jerusalem of which Christians are citizens. He compares the church to the pagan cults this way: “One might perhaps say, that as the profane Ekklesia of antiquity was an institution of the polis, so... Read more
Traveling by sea to Rome, Paul encounters a storm, plunges into the sea and then arrives at Malta. He is an unreluctant Jonah, cross the sea westward to call a Gentile empire to repentance. But why the unusually detailed travelogue in Acts 27? Sidon, Cyprus, Cilicia, Pamphylia, Myra in Lycia, Cnidus, Fair Havens, and on and on: Luke provides a step-by-step record of the trip. The closest analogy is Numbers 33: “the sons of Israel journeyed from Ramseses, and camped... Read more
Let us suppose that the Son dwells in flesh, dies to flesh, rises in Spirit, all to prepare a new humanity to receive the radiance of light within. What might be wrong with that? One objection might be: Why does God need time to prepare a body? As a student, Stephen Long, recently pointed out to me, there is a thread of Greek philosophy that implies that if God is capable of doing something He must do it, and must... Read more
What difference does the incarnation make? For Athanasius, it means (among other things, of course) that grace is worked from within humanity rather than being offered extrinsically from without, as grace was given to Adam. Redemption history is a movement from extrinsic to intrinsic grace, as the Father raises Adam’s children into communion by the Son and Spirit. Or (borrowing the light/radiance analogy from Athanasius): Adam is illumined by external light; those of the new Adam are glorified by radiance... Read more
Levinas opposes the reduction of the Other to the Same. So, with more reason, does Athanasius: The Father and Son are not one in the sense that “one thing is twice named, so that the Same ( ton auton ) becomes at one time Father, at another time His own Son.” This is the error of Sabellius. If the Trinity hadn’t been muted in modern theology, we wouldn’t have needed Levinas or any of the theorists who followed. Read more
Chee-Chiew Lee has an interesting article on the phrase “company of nations” in Genesis 35:11. She links the promise that Jacob will become a company of nations to the promise that Abraham would be a father of many nations in Genesis 17:4-5. But 35:11 adds an important gloss to the earlier promise: “While the promise that Abraham will be the ‘father of many nations’ may still be fulfilled to some extent by his physical descendants, the promise that Jacob will... Read more
Peter Singer ( Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) ) gives a neat summary of the paradoxes of desire in Hegel: “Desire appeared as the expression of the fact that self-consciousness needs an external object, and yet finds itself limited by anything that is outside itself. But to desire something is to be unsatisfied; so desire is – to make a typically Hegelian play on words – an unsatisfactory state for self-consciousness. Worse still, self-consciousness seems doomed to... Read more
A web summary of Lacan’s negative account of desire says, “In constructing our fantasy-version of reality, we establish coordinates for our desire; we situate both ourselves and our object of desire, as well as the relation between. As Slavoj Zizek puts it, ’ through fantasy, we learn how to desire’ ( Looking Awry 6). Our desires therefore necessarily rely on lack, since fantasy, by definition, does not correspond to anything in the real. Our object of desire (what Lacan terms... Read more
“I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me,” says the bride in the Song of Songs (7:10). “Desire” is the same word used in Genesis 3:16 and 4:7, both of which describe a desire for authority, domination, rule, a threatening desire. The bridegroom of the Song reverses the curse: His desire is for His bride, rather than Eve’s desire for Adam; and the bridegroom’s desire is not a manipulative and acquisitive desire but a desire that brings mutual... Read more
We’re all deists. The design of the universe shows that a Great Intelligent Something is responsible for it. No, says Athanasius. The design of the universe is the impress of eternal wisdom on the creation. The cunning of creation doesn’t manifest “God,” but eternal creative Wisdom, the eternal Word, whose name is Jesus. Read more
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