INTRODUCTION Jesus and His disciples are “sons” of the great King of the temple (17:25-26), and therefore they are brothers of Jesus and one another. The rest of chapter 18 tells us how brothers treat each other. THE TEXT “Moreover if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you have gained your brother. But if he will not hear, take with you one or two more .... Read more
A few inconclusive suggestions about the strange story at the end of Matthew 17. First, I take the majority view that the tax in question is the temple tax, and that helps to explain the distinction of sons and strangers that Jesus makes. In a temple context, the sons are those who are members of the house, who have access to the king, in short, priests. Strangers are the “unauthorized” who are not permitted in the house. When Jesus includes... Read more
Matthew 18:4: Whoever humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Children are blessings from the Lord, but how are they blessings? In many ways: There are daily delights in having little children around the house, and there are deeper joys in watching children grow to adulthood. Through our children, our lives, values, projects, hopes, names, continue past our lifetimes. Through our children, above all, our faith continues past our lifetime, as our children... Read more
I fell for it. Hamann begins a brief discussion of the temporality of truth apparently agreeing with Mendelssohn, “I, too, know of no eternal truths except those who are unceasingly temporal.” Stephen Dunning ( Tongues of Men ) explains the dense irony of the statement. Hamann is responding to Mendelssohn’s threefold classification of truth as eternal (known by unaided reason), historical (through God’s dealings with the patriarchs), and the specific truth embodied in Jewish moral and ceremonial law. Hamann doesn’t... Read more
Hamann writes, “The spirit of observation and the spirit of prophecy are the wings of human genius. All that is present belongs to the domain of the former; all that is absent, the past and the future, belongs to the domain of the latter. Philosophical genius expresses its power through striving, by means of abstraction, to make what is present absent; it disrobes actual objects into naked concepts and merely conceivable attributes, into pure appearances and phenomena. Poetic genius expresses... Read more
Hamann (“Metacritique”) says that “words as undetermined objects of empirical concepts are entitled critical appearances, specters, non-words or unwords, and become determinate objects for the understanding only through their institution and meaning in usage. This meaning and its determination arises, as everyone knows, from the combination of a word-sign, which is a priori arbitrary and indifferent and a posteriori necessary and indispensable, with the intuition of the word itself; through this reiterated bond the concept is communicated to, imprinted on,... Read more
Hamann agreed with Mendelssohn that there are “no eternal truths save as incessant temporality,” and in this he locates the difference between Judaism and Christianity: “it is solely a matter of temporal truths of history, which occurred once and never come again – of facts which have become true at one point in time and place through a coherence of causes and effects, and which, therefore, can only be conceived as true in respect to that point in time and... Read more
Hamann from “Golgotha and Sheblimini”: “the entire range of human events and the whole course of their vicissitudes would be encompassed and divided into subsections just as the starry firmament is divided into figures, without knowing the stars’ number. Hence the entire history of the Jewish people, by the allegory of their ceremonial law, appears to be a living mind- and heart-rousing primer of all historical literature in heaven, on and under the earth – an adamantine hint forward to... Read more
Before God tells creatures to “be fruitful and multiply,” He blesses them. Blessing is a verbal pronouncement that proliferates. But so is curse: “Your sorrows will be multiplied,” Yahweh tells Eve at the gate of the garden, and later wicked people multiply on the earth, long before the righteous do. Read more
Before Yahweh ever promises that Abraham’s seed through Sarah will multiply, He promises that to Ishmael (Genesis 16:10). The line goes from Adam to Noah to Ishmael; he is the first Abrahamic new Adam, before Abraham himself is described in these Adamic terms. This is further support for Paul’s allegory of Ishmael and Isaac in Galatians 4. Read more
Leithart
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