Sage advice for Obama from a 2007 report from the Brookings Institution: “the only things standing between Iraq and a descent into a Lebanon- or Bosnia-style maelstrom is 140,000 American troops.” And if the future of Iraq is not sufficient motivation, there’s the legacy: If America withdraws, “we should expect many hundreds of thousands or even millions of people to die with three or four times that number wounded . . . . Of course, an Iraqi civil war will... Read more
William Weinrich, formerly patristics professor at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and currently serving as Rector of the Luther Academy, the seminary for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia in Riga, Latvia, offers some important correctives to my claims about the absence of debate about Christianizing the empire in the fourth century: “Perhaps not a ‘raging debate,’ but there is evidence of serious reflection about the relation of church to empire/state. The development on this issue of John... Read more
From Neill and Wright again, summarizing the assumptions behind William Hietmuller’s early twentieth-century work on Paul’s views on sacraments. Hietmuller placed Paul within the history of religions, and arrived at conclusions that have guided many Pauline scholars ever since. As summarized by Neill and Wright, there are four principles at work: a) There is radical difference between preaching of Jesus and the theology of Paul; b) Paul is self-contradictory, and unaware of it; c) The source of the contradiction is... Read more
Schweitzer didn’t think so, but he did think that Paul prepared the ground for Hellenization. According to the summary found in Stephen Neill and N. T. Wright’s history of New Testament interpretation, Schweitzer identified the primary historical problem of Paul studies, namely to explain the transition from Jesus to Paul and from Paul to later Greek theology: “The great and still undischarged task which confronts those engaged in historical study of primitive Christianity is to explain how the teaching of... Read more
Irenaeus interpreted Jesus’ parable of the laborers in the vineyard as a parable about Jews and Gentiles (Matthew 20:1-16). The first-hour men are Jews, and the eleventh-hour men, who slip into the vineyard at the last minute, are Gentiles converted by the apostles. Over the surly objections of the Jews, the owner gives the same denarius to all. Let’s assume that this is a valid interpretation. If so, one of the interesting details is that the owner explicitly contracts only... Read more
Luke 3-4 follows, like Matthew 3-4, the history of Israel. Jesus is the true Israel, recapitulating Israel’s failed story. But the sequence is somewhat different in the two passages. In Matthew, Jesus receives baptism from John, enters the wilderness to be tempted, begins His ministry in Galilee, before ascending to a mountain to teach on the law. In Luke, Jesus is baptized, enters the wilderness to endure Satan’s temptations, and then goes to Galilee to announce the year of Jubilee.... Read more
INTRODUCTION Jesus continues on the way toward Jerusalem , predicting His own future and teaching the Twelve about discipleship. They don’t understand, but fortunately Jesus is the compassionate Son of David, who opens blind eyes ( 20:29 -34). THE TEXT “Now Jesus, going up to Jerusalem, took the twelve disciples aside on the road and said to them, ‘ Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and to... Read more
Psalm 89 explicitly tells us that Yahweh entered into a covenant with David (v. 28), which makes David the firstborn over the kings of the earth (v. 27) and promises a perpetual seed and sonship (vv. 26, 29). The Psalm as a whole, however, is about an apparently broken covenant. No sooner has the Psalmist repeated Yahweh’s promise to preserve David’s seed as the sun and moon (vv. 36-37) than the Psalmist suddenly protests that Yahweh has in fact cast... Read more
In the first volume of his history of ethics, Terence Irwin gievs a chapter to Plato, four to Aristotle, but nine to Aquinas. Reviewing the book in the TLS , Anthony Kenny says that Aquinas “emerges as the hero of the entire volume,” and, after noting that Irwin holds a chair of ancient philosophy at Oxford, notes “there have been some changes in that university since the days of A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, and Irwin’s predecessor, G. E.... Read more
A TLS reviewer of Will Self’s recent Liver compares Self’s work with that of the late David Foster Wallace: “He shared with Self a willingness to experiment with genre, pastische and several other acutely artificial literary devices, as well as a sense of the grotesque, a liking for long words and a commitment to explore the particular miseries of a sharply draw present (including addiction). But he [Wallace] struggled (and the struggle makes his work difficult to read sometimes, which... Read more
Leithart
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