“Independence” of Jesus

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:45 pm By Peter Leithart

Nathan Kerr ( Christ, History, Apocalyptic ) explains Yoder’s notion of Jesus’ “independence” by saying that Jesus “lives, concretely and in history, a life-story that is entirely free from and irreducible to any pre-given ‘historical’ coordinates, any general or ‘meta’ principle that might serve to range the complexities and contingencies of history within any universalizable scope or logic.” It also indicates how “his apocalyptic historicity happens concomitantly as the intensification and transformation of the historically contingent as such.” Perhaps I’ve... Read more

Whited graves

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:48 pm By Peter Leithart

Jesus’ image of the Pharisees as “white-washed graves” is multi-dimensional. First, there is the obvious contrast between the apparently pure outside (white) and the inside (bones and uncleanness). In context, the Pharisees have become filled with corpses by devouring other Jews. They are cannibals, insatiable as the grave. Second, as Duncan Derrett points out, tombs were white-washed at Passover to enable pilgrims to avoid contamination caused by inadvertently stepping on a grave. When they make themselves all “white” on the... Read more

Gnats and camels

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:42 pm By Peter Leithart

Duncan Derrett again: Jesus condemns the Pharisees and scribes as “blind men,” and their blindness is a myopia that makes it impossible for them to distinguish between gnats and camels. Both are prohibited foods, but “their throats are wide, their bellies capacious for the unclean.” For all their their obsession with cleanness, they are in fact filling themselves with dead men’s bones, defiling themselves by cannibalizing fellow Jews. Read more

Unclean vessels

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:50 pm By Peter Leithart

Duncan Derrett points to the OT background to Jesus’ saying about unclean vessels. According to the law, a vessel was rendered unclean in the interior when an animal dropped into the vessel. Some vessels could be scrubbed clean, others had to be broken (Leviticus 11). A vessel became clean when it was scoured on the inside. Under the law, it is possible for a vessel to be unclean on the exterior, but clean inside. What is not possible is the... Read more

Apostasy

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:46 pm By Peter Leithart

For a number of years, I’ve been using the analogy of marriage to explain apostasy. Turns out I wasn’t the first. Jeremiah does too. Jeremiah uses some variation of the root shub (“turn, return, turn away”) nearly 50 times in his prophecy. One of the specific words is meshubah, translated at times as “faithless,” but more literally “turning back,” “backsliding” or even (as in some English translations) as “apostasy.” (more…) Read more

Good times

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:43 pm By Peter Leithart

Along with a friend, my son, Jordan, has started an online comic strip. Check it out here every Tuesday and Thursday: http://www.goodtimescomic.blogspot.com/ Read more

Proverbs 26:17-19

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:03 am By Peter Leithart

PROVERBS 26:17 Verse 17 returns to the use of dog imagery. We recall that dogs are scavengers in the Bible, feeding on death. Dogs eat flesh and lap up blood. They are greedy, constantly hungry for more (Isaiah 56:11). They tear things to pieces (Matthew 7:6). In short, they are dangerous and wild, not “man’s best friend.” The setting here seems may be a dogfight in which a man tried to intervene by taking one of the dogs by his... Read more

Blood and Soil again

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:48 pm By Peter Leithart

Mike Bull from Australia sends along some comments on my earlier posts about “blood and soil.” The rest of this post is from Mike: “Jesus doesn’t just overcome and send the powers packing. But also, he doesn’t just pacify and reconcile them. He tears them in two, like two goats. Anything made new is something old torn in two as it passed through the veil. Using soil as an example, not just territory/nationalism, I would use the Land/Holy Place to... Read more

Tertullian and empire, again again

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:56 pm By Peter Leithart

First I post a quotation, then I add a post raising questions about its genuineness. Now I find that it was genuine in the first place. Tertullian, On Idolatry , 19 asks “whether a believer may turn himself unto military service, and whether the military may be admitted unto the faith, even the rank and file, or each inferior grade, to whom there is no necessity for taking part in sacrifices or capital punishments.” He answers: “There is no agreement... Read more

Polis against man

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:04 am By Peter Leithart

O’Donovan again: “By what right is the term ‘political’ claimed exclusively for the defense of social structures which refuse the deeper spiritual and cosmic aspirations of mankind? The price to be paid by classical republicanism is that of pitting political order against human fulfillment, of making the polis constitutionally hostile to philosophy, theology and artistic vision. It confines the social good to something that would satisfy an assembly of slave-holding landowners . . . . If political order must be... Read more