In his first interview as President, Obama told Al-Arabiya that America needs to learn to listen because “all too often the United States starts by dictating.” Does anyone honestly believe that American diplomats go into the Middle East and starts by ordering everybody around? Of course, US diplomats have a lot of clout, which they use to persuade, bully, get their way. But surely Obama cannot really believe that he’s the first to discover that listening is part of the... Read more
In Galatians 1, Paul twice says things happen “in him.” God reveals His Son “in me” (1:16). The phrase could mean “through me,” suggesting that Paul is an instrument of God’s unveiling of the Son. It’s just as possible, though, that Paul is himself the locus of that revelation; he is one of the places where God shows Himself. At the end of the chapter, Paul says that everyone was glorifying God “in me” because he had turned from persecutor... Read more
According to Paul’s summary, the gospel is about Jesus’ self-gift, which plucks us from this present evil age (Galatians 1:4). What is that evil age? Paul’s use of “then/now” shows in the chapter shows what it means for him. The Galatians have heard about his zeal for the ancestral traditions of Judaism, his manner of life “then” (1:13). At that time, zeal took the form of persecution of the church. Paul returns to his life “then” at the end of... Read more
Paul uses the noun “gospel” or the verb “evangelize/preach the gospel” twelve times in the first two chapters of Galatians. It is good news for the twelve tribes. While we can’t rest too much on grammatical forms, it is interesting to note the objects of the verb euaggelizo in these chapters. Typically, the object of “evangelize” is not the audience but the content of the announcement. Specifically, in Galatians 1:16 the object is “Him,” the Son whom the Fathe who... Read more
INTRODUCTION Jesus arrives in Jerusalem like a king (21:5) and immediately goes to the temple. It is His first visit to the temple in Matthew’s gospel, and He is not impressed. He condemns it as a robbers’ den, and then sets up His own ministry of healing in the house of prayer. THE TEXT “Now when they drew near Jerusalem , and came to Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives , then Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, ‘Go... Read more
An English friend who knows whereof he speaks assures me that the statistics that I cited about the Royal Navy last week were off. The Royal Navy has 90 vessels, not 35 as I claimed (following Thomas Madden). Madden’s point still stands: The Royal Navy is only a fraction of what it was after World War II. Read more
The outgoing President has taken a lot of shots, some plausible but many preposterous. Madden notes that the claim that Bush has turned himself into a kind of American Augustus is historically naive: “Claiming that President Bush or any other American presidence is a new Pompey or Augustus is simply the kind of frivolousness to be expected in a time of Pax. It sells books and makes for good talk-show fodder, but it is historically absurd. The men who overturned... Read more
Obama’s election shuffles up the politics of race not only in the obvious ways but in subtle ways. He got to the Presidency without moving through the post-civil rights black establishment – witness the tense relationship he had with Jesse Jackson. He got to the Presidency without playing the victimhood-and-entitlement game that the black establishment has plied for several decades. That’s a good thing. Obama’s election also highlights one of the most important social developments of the past half-century, the... Read more
Madden examines the Jewish War (66-70 AD) in some detail, using it as an illustration of the difficulty of controlling religiously motivated terrorism, and he interestingly points out that Diaspora Jews not only celebrated the exploits of Palestinian guerillas but also initiated conflicts in their own cities: “As news of the violence in Jerusalem spread [in 66], the killing was mirrored across the region and then the empire . . . . Diaspora Jews sympathized with their coreligionists, but few... Read more
Thomas Madden ( Empire of Trust ) notes “In 1939 Belgium had an army larger than that of the United States.” Today, there are 40,000 Belgians in uniform. Like many countries of Europe, it has a military that is “good for parades.” Britain has reduced its navy from 900 vessels after World War II to 35 today. Madden makes the obvious point that this is possible only because of America’s military power, much despised in Europe. Read more
Leithart
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