Paul contrasts fulfilling the law of loving neighbor with biting, devouring, and consuming. Love for neighbor is human behavior; anything else is feral. The verb “bite” ( dakno ) is used only in Galatians 5:15 in the NT, and only twice in the LXX (Genesis 49:17; Deuteronomy 8:15), both references to biting snakes. Failing to fulfill the law of love is not only bestial but Satanic. Of course, he still has the Judaizers in mind, and is hinting that they... Read more
Galatians 5-6 turns a number of Pauline terms inside out. After spending most of the letter polemicizing against seeking justification form the “works of the law,” Paul rehabilitates both “work” (5:6) and “law” (5:14; 6:2). After announcing that in Christ we have been freed from the Egypt of Judaic managers and tutors, he instructs us to use our freedom to become slaves to one another (5:13). He doesn’t quite rehabilitate flesh, though he has told us early on that life... Read more
Galatians 5-6 is organized as a chiasm, with the exhortation to bear one another’s burdens, and fulfill the law of Christ, at the center. The structure suggests that that the freedom that the Spirit grants is precisely freedom to bear the burdens of others as Christ as done for us. A. 5:1-15: focus on issues of freedom, circumcision, and the law B. 5:16-26: flesh and Spirit; circumcision isn’t mentioned C. 6:1-5: bearing burdens and fulfilling law of Christ B’. 6:6-10:... Read more
Freeman again: He claims that Constantine employed the image of the sun, used in both Christianity and paganism, to maintain “his neutral position between opposing faiths.” In part, his interpretation is based on HA Drake. But the neutrality that Drake talks about is a neutrality in “public space” that enabled the development of “a stable coalition of both Christians and non-Christians in support of this program of ‘peaceful co-existence,’” a coalition that Drake says was more successful “than has generally... Read more
Freeman says that Constantine’s “conversion” was a shrewd political act, basing this conclusion, he claims, on “recent research.” (Burckhardt is recent??) One sign of his shrewdness was his ability to satisfy both Christian and pagan: “Some very careful political manoeuvring was necessary if Constantine was to avoid offending either Christian or pagan.” If this was his aim, he wasn’t so good at it. In a letter of 332, he complained that the ” oak of Mambre, where we find that... Read more
The epigram to chapter 11 of Charles Freeman’s Closing of the Western Mind is from a letter of Constantine to the churches in Alexandria: “We have received from Divine Providence the supreme favor of being relieved of all error.” The footnote leads to Ramsay Macmullen’s Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries where Macmullen says that Constantine defied the Council of Elvira’s prohibition of images in church by erecting statues of “Jesus enthroned like a Roman magistrate” in... Read more
Yesterday, Hillary Clinton disappointed human rights activists by degrading the role of human rights issues in her discussions with Chinese. Differences on human rights will not, she said, interfere with the common interests of the US and China. Today, she commends the Chinese for bailing out the US by continuing to buy Treasury bonds. Make that: Differences on human rights will not keep the US from desperately asking the Chinese to prop up the US economy. Read more
Momigliano again, pointing out that the church had ways of dealing with the barbarian threat that were not available to pagans: “The educated pagan was by definition afraid of barbarians. There was no bridge between the aristocratic ideals of a pagan and the primitive violence of the German invader.” At best, a few barbarians might be educated and become Roman, but “the ordinary barbarian as such was nothing more than a nightmare to educated pagans.” Christians, on the other hand,... Read more
Not not did the church draw the best men, men who otherwise would have been, Momigliano says, “generals, governors or provinces, advisers to the emperors,” but it drew popular enthusiasm and loyalty, and money: “Money which would have gone to the building of a theatre or of an aqueduct now went to the building of churches and monasteries. The social equilibrium changed—to the advantage of the spiritual and physical conditions of monks and priests, but to the disadvantage of the... Read more
Arnaldo Momigliano suggests that one of the key ways that Christianity contributed to the decline of Rome was by siphoning off the best and brightest to the church. The “central feature of the fourth century” was “the emergence of the Church as an organization competing with the State itself and becoming attractive to educated and influential persons. The State, though trying to regiment everything, was not able to prevent or suppress the competition of the Church. A man could in... Read more
Leithart
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