Yahweh speaks the Ten Words to his son, Israel. The Words are ultimately pointing to the Son, who takes flesh to become true Israel. The Ten Words speak of Jesus, and Jesus is the final interpretation of their demands. “Honor your father and your mother,” the Lord says, and Jesus embodies perfect honor to His father and mother. Jesus slips away from his parents while they’re in Jerusalem, demonstrating, as Barth says, that children may honor their parents against their... Read more
The fifth commandment – Honor your father and your mother – is a counter-cultural demand. Many in our time live according to the 1960s maxim, Question authority. It’s apparently an authoritative command, and it applies in the family as well as everywhere else. But the counter-cultural character of this commandment runs even deeper. It’s not just the commandment itself that violates contemporary norms. The social picture assumed by the commandment has disappeared in many places. The command to “honor” assumes... Read more
English translations typically say that Israel remembers the Sabbath to “keep it holy.” That implies that the day is already holy, and that Israel maintains its holiness by ceasing. That is true; Israel’s consecration of the day depends on Yahweh’s prior consecration of the day (v. 11). In some places, the Lord commands Israel to “guard” the Sabbath, which implies that it is a holy thing that must be protected from profanation. But the verb is more direct. It simply... Read more
The Fourth Word begins with: “Memorialize the day of ceasing to sanctify it.” I’m using the verb “memorialize” or “commemorate” rather than “remember.” It’s not a command to “call to mind.” Of course, Israel isn’t to forget. But it wouldn’t be enough for Israel to call the Sabbath to mind without actually practicing the Sabbath. The Fourth Word is a command about a set of practices, certain things that Israel is supposed to do or not do. It’s like the... Read more
Reading Revelation 6-7, we might unthinkingly assume that four horsemen, the martyrs, the sealing of the 144,000 are things contained in the book. That can’t be true. This is a scroll, and you can’t read the contents of a sealed scroll until all of the seals have been opened. The things revealed as the seals are opened prepare for the reading of the book, but they aren’t the book’s contents. Revelation is a vision, but it’s not nonsense. If there’s... Read more
The Lord curses Cain in Genesis 4:12: “When you serve (avad) the ground (adamah), it will not give (natan) its strength (koach) to you.” Invert that, and we have a fair summary of God’s blessing, and a mini theology of the natural environment. Humanity’s stance toward the earth: Service, not exploitation, pillage, or rape. When the adamah is well served, she gives. The relation of humanity to creation is not master-servant. Humanity doesn’t dominate but serves; and the exchange that... Read more
In his 1876 letter in Fors Clavigera, Ruskin muses on the import of the sons of Ham. Mizraim, Phut, and Sion represent three African powers and three natural environments, the watered plain, the desert, and the sea. Each also represents a certain stage of human development: “A. Egypt is essentially the Hamite slavish strength of body and intellect. “B. Ethiopia, the Hamite slavish affliction of body and intellect; condemnation of the darkened race that can no more change its skin... Read more
Ruskin’s concept of “typical beauty” is a piece of theological aesthetics. In the second volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin distinguished kinds of beauty, the typical and the vital. Of the first, he says: “that external quality of bodies already so often spoken of, and which, whether it occur in a stone, flower, beast, or man, is absolutely identical: which . . . may be shown to be in some sort typical of the Divine attributes, and which, therefore, I shall,... Read more
In the third volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin addresses the “German dulness, and English affectation” that has “multiplied among us the use of two of the most objectionable words that were ever coined by the troublesomeness of metaphysicians,—namely, ‘Objective,’ and ‘Subjective.'” The words are “exquisitely . . . useless” and he sincerely to “get them out of my way, and out of my reader’s.” What he has in mind is a theory of this sort: “The word ‘Blue,’ say certain... Read more
George Landow argues (Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows) that the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins would look less bizarre, though no less innovative, if we placed Hopkins more firmly in the poetics of his time. Which is to say, placed him in the context of a typological poetics. Hopkins’s “entire conception of inscape and its relation to the structure of a poem seems to develop from a mind accustomed to seeking types and figures of Christ” (7). Landow cites “The Windover”... Read more
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