Hebrews 4:12-13: For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account. Hebrews tells us that the word of God is a... Read more
Eucharist has always been the center of the worship of the people of God. Abel worshiped Yahweh at an altar, which is to say, a table, and so did Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and all Israel . That continued into the new covenant, where the Lord’s Supper instituted by Jesus became the central act of Christian liturgy. Enjoying a fellowship meal with God has always been the climax of worship. Yet, Christians have had different experiences of this table, and... Read more
Jesus says the Father seeks worshipers who worship in Spirit and in truth. We know that “spiritual worship” doesn’t mean immaterial, non-bodily worship. It couldn’t: Even if we sit as quietly as Quakers, we need our bodies to fill the chair. But what does it mean to worship in Spirit? To answer that, we need to recognize that Jesus was talking about the Holy Spirit, and then we need to ask, What does the Spirit do? (more…) Read more
Charles Krauthammer has a sharp analysis of the AIG bonus fiasco: “in the scheme of things, $165 million is a rounding error. It amounts to less than 1/18,500 of the $3.1 trillion federal budget. It’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the bailout money given to AIG alone. If Bill Gates were to pay these AIG bonuses every year for the next 100 years, he’d still be left with more than half his personal fortune.” He argues that the... Read more
Schmemann again (from an appendix to For the Life of the World ): “To condemn a heresy is relatively easy. What is much more difficult is to detect the question it implies, and to give this question an adequate answer. Such, however, was always the Church’s dealing with ‘heresies’ – they always provoked an effort of creativity within the Church so that the condemnation became ultimately a widening and deepening of the Christian faith itself. To fight Arianism, St. Athanasius... Read more
Schmemann anticipates Milbank: “Secularism – we must again and again stresss this – is a ‘stepchild’ of Christianity, as are, in the last analysis, all secular ideologies which today dominate the world – not, as it is claimed by the Western apostles of a Christian acceptance of secularism, a legitimate child, but a heresy .” And channels de Lubac: “It is indeed much easier to live and to breathe within neat distinctions between the sacred and the profane, the natural... Read more
David VanDrunen of Westminster West offered an interesting Christological defense of iconoclasm in an article several years ago published in the International Journal of Systematic Theology . Christology, he argues, does not support the conclusion that we may make pictures of Jesus, but the opposite. Because Jesus is still the Incarnate Son, because He is still fully human, He has all the specificity of true humanity. He has specific facial and bodily features, and we don’t know what those are.... Read more
My article from First Things is now available in German at: http://www.freikirchen.at/2009/03/haltet-das-fasten-feiert-das-fest/ Read more
NT Wright has long argued that first-century Jews considered themselves to be in a continuing exile. The canon of the Hebrew Bible suggests as much. If we take our arrangement (the LXX arrangement), the Hebrew Bible ends with Malachi, who certainly doesn’t see a gloriously restored Israel when he looks around him. If we take the MT arrangement, the Hebrew Bible ends with the decree of Cyrus; it’s as if the return has never happened. Either way, the canonical arrangement... Read more
An essay of mine on “Triune Holiness” is posted here, along with other essays on the Trinity: 2009 Trinity Blogging Summit Read more
Leithart
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