Job 2:7: So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD, and struck Job with painful boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. Job is a king. He is the greatest of the men of the east; later he says that he delivers the poor and orphan from oppressors, and that he does not ignore the rights of widows; in his last speech he says that if he could see the indictment against... Read more
After Jesus finished dictating the letters to the seven churches, the Apostle John looked up and saw a “door standing open in heaven” and heard a trumpet voice call out, “Come up here.” Since Adam was expelled from the garden, humanity had longed to return. Century after century, no one did. Armed cherubim, veils, and locked doors kept everyone on the outside. When the glory descended, even the priests had to scatter from the Most Holy Place . Then, at... Read more
It’s hard to stop once you get a good ceremony going, Mary Beard shows in her 2007 The Roman Triumph . She notes that the last actual Roman triumph took place sometime between the fourth and sixth century but that didn’t stop imitators: “Renaissance princelings launched hundreds of triumphal celebrations. Napoleon carted through the streets of Paris the sculpture and painting he had seized in Italy, in pointed imitation of a Roman triumph. As late as 1899 the victories of... Read more
Thomas Mathews ( The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton Paperbacks) ) claims that since the work of Kantorowicz, Andreas Alfoldi, and Andre Grabar, interpretations of early Christian art have been dominated by the “emperor mystique.” As summarized by Grabar, the theory is that the history of Christian art is divided by the conversion of Constantine. Prior to Constantine, “Christian images consisted of one or two figures referring to some biblical event.” After, in Grabar’s terms,... Read more
Robert Wilken ( The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought ) has written that “Eusebius directed attention, for the first time in Christian history, to the religious and theological significance of space.” In describing the church of the Resurrection, he uses “a sacral vocabulary that has few precedents in Christian literature before his time.” Yet, Wilken also recognizes that long before the fourth century “Christians gathered for worship at the places where the faithful departed had been... Read more
In a 1959 article “Christian Envy of the Temple,” H. Nibley points out that the early Christians derived their liturgical theology from the temple: “They boast that the Church possesses all the physical properties of the Temple-the oil, the myrrh, the altar, the incense, hymns, priestly robes, etc., everything, in fact, but the Temple itself, for ‘in the place of the tangible Temple we behold the spiritual.’ Strange, that the solid walls should vanish and all the rest remain! Even... Read more
Truth-telling has come to be seen as mean-spirited, bigoted, nasty. Truth-telling is hateful, we have come to believe. Soothing lies are often preferred. Solomon sees things different. “A lying tongue hates those it crushes” (Proverbs 26:27). That carries two implications, each of which has a converse. First, it indicates that lies are hateful; when we lie, we treat another as an enemy (and this is why lying to enemies is condoned in the Bible). Conversely, truth-telling is an act of... Read more
PROVERBS 26:22 Language is a constant theme of the Proverbs. Wisdom is skill, and one of the central skills a wise person must learn is skill in speech. This skill has not only to do with speaking the truth, but even more with questions of tone and timing. Wisdom is like having a sense of rhythm, learning God’s ways and words well enough to lean into the next step at just the right time. Wisdom in words is like being... Read more
Angeliki E. Laiou has another revealing article in the Wealth and Poverty volume cited earlier. She notes the regular warnings and even condemnations of commerce in the patristic literature, and goes on to examine medieval and Byzantine hagiography for the same themes. She is surprised to find a fairly positive view of merchants. Saints use the marketplace for their charitable work – selling produce to raise money for the poor, securing loans which the poor then use to pay rent... Read more
An article by A. Edward Siecienski (in Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society (Holy Cross Studies in Patristic Theology and History) ) raises the question of the balance between liturgical splendor and poverty relief in the early church. He points out that even John Chrysostom, who thundered so vigorously against the exploitation of the rich, preached in a cathedral in Constantinople and paraded the city behind silver crosses he had received as a gift from the empress. Virutally... Read more
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