What did the Judaizers want? According to Galatians 6:12, they wanted to make a “good show” in the flesh. The verb for “making a good show” ( euprosopeo ) is a hapax in the NT and very rare elsewhere, but we might make a go at translating and interpreting through etymology. The word is clearly linked with prosopon , “face,” and the idea is perhaps that the Judaizers want to have “good face” through insisting that Gentiles observe circumcision and... Read more
Matthew Continetti analyzes our cultural moment, and the likely impact of Obama’s policies, in a Weekly Standard piece. He says that Obama recognizes that the problem is a collapse of responsibility among cultural and political elites, following by a corresponding collapse of trust in those elites. Yet, Obama’s stimulus package and expansion of government will not solve the problem; in fact, they’ll make it worse: “Obama identified the pervasive lack of accountability among American political, economic, and cultural elites. He... Read more
“They pierced my hands and my feet.” The voice is the voice of David, but we know from the gospels that the words describe Jesus on the cross. Jesus is fixed to the cross by nails through his feet. Feet are associated with strength and dominion. A conqueror tramples his enemies under his feet, and places his foot on the neck of his enemies. An enthroned king makes his enemies a footstool for His feet. God created man to have... Read more
1 Peter 3:7: You husbands likewise, live with your wives in an understanding way, as with a weaker vessel. As Toby has pointed out in the sermon, Paul describes the wife as a “vessel” that a husbands is to treat with honor. This is, as Toby pointed out, a priestly image, since the word Paul uses refers in the Old Testament to the “vessels” of temple worship – the plates and bowls and cups and forks and snuffers. These are... Read more
Lent is a season for taking stock and cleaning house, a time of self-examination, confession and repentance. But we need to remind ourselves constantly what true repentance looks like. “Giving up” something for Lent is fine, but you keep Lent best by making war on all the evil habits and sinful desires that prevent you from running the race with patience. Going through the motions of Lent without turning to God and putting our sins to death is hypocrisy, and... Read more
Summarizing the lessons drawn from Steve Coll’s recent The Bin Ladens , Fred Halliday writes (in NYRB ), “although the attacks on Manhattan and Washington in September 2001 were direct hits on American soil, Osama bin Laden’s aims do not encompass the defeat of the United States, or the conquest of the West, by, or ‘for,’ Islam: the attacks on Europe and the US are, in Arabian tribal terminology, ‘raids.’ The ‘planes operation,’ as it was originally called when it... Read more
Ian McEwan’s NYRB remembrance of Updike is the best obit I’ve read. He gets the dynamic of Updike right, locating the “seriousness and dark humor” in a “tension between intellectual reach and metaphysical dread.” He understands the centrality of Updike’s Lutheranism and of the cinema. He gets the sex right: “It was there from the beginning, in his writing, that celebrated or infamus capacity for fastidious, clinical, visually intense, painfully and uproariously honest descriptions of men and women making love.”... Read more
I have had conversations with several people recently about the state of poetry, and I’ve seen other signs that there is a growing interest among Christians in reviving poetry. That’s great; the Bible’s written in poetry, and our un-poetic sensibilities have been one reason for our un-imaginative and inaccurate reading of the Bible. But I tend to throw a wet blanket on efforts to revive poetry, because I think the sociological and cultural factors stacked against poetry are vast. To... Read more
Sean Mahaffey writes: “The story of Paul seems to end ‘wrong.’ Here is a classically trained bold and faithful preacher with a leadership resume chained in the emperor’s house. Paul seems another Joseph/Daniel/Mordecai/Nehemiah. He should have been raised to a position of prominence – perhaps to the right hand of the emperor – perhaps after interpreting a dream or prophesying. The Caesar should have been at least nominally converted under Paul’s ministry and the empire should have enacted many of... Read more
Philip Esler draws on the anthropological work of Anthony Cohen to suggest that Paul’s reference to “biting” and “devouring” may describe the actual internal life of Paul’s churches: “Anthony Cohen’s argument about the persistence of liminality among persons once they have crossed a boundary to join a new group raises the prospect that the members of the congregations had not yet internalized the values expected of them and continued to treat one another in the fiercely competitive way typical of... Read more
Leithart
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