The Pharisaical practice of washing before meals is legally odd (as pointed out by Roger Booth, Jesus and the Laws of Purity ). The one explicit reference to the need for laymen to wash hands is Leviticus 15:11 doesn’t have to do with food or with victims of uncleanness. Leviticus 15:11 says that an man who is unclean because of a genital discharge communicates that uncleanness to anyone he touches, unless he rinses his hands first; but the Pharisees are... Read more
Ernst Lohmeyer ( Lord of the Temple ) argues that Jesus’ saying on defilement in Mark 7 (=Matthew 15) “transfers the whole question of purity from the plant of material externals to that of man’s inner self . . . . there emerges in unmistakable superiority the inner world of the human heart which alone is able to make a man holy or unholy, clean or unclean.” He goes on to admit that “‘what comes out of the mouth’ denotes... Read more
Matthew 14:22-16:12 is arranged in a chiastic pattern, repeatedly focusing on food but centering on Jesus’ healing ministry: A. Crossing the sea, 14:22-36 B. Pharisees and scribes question Jesus about washing before meals, 15:1-20 C. Jesus gives crumbs to the Canaanite woman, 15:21-29 D. Jesus heals the multitudes, 15:29-31 C’. Jesus feeds 4000, 15:32-39 B’. Pharisees and Sadducees test Jesus, 16:1-4 A’. Disciples forget bread while crossing the sea, 16:5-12 Read more
On clear nights, I can see the Milky Way stretching across the sky from my drive way. Since the mid-nineteenth century, fewer and fewer have easy sight of the night sky. In Hong Kong, the buildings stretch and loom so high that the streets below are a cavernous indoor mall, a throbbing dystopian under-city. Hans Blumenberg wonders what this does to the imagination: Night-lighted cities constitute “a secession from one of the most human possibilities: that of disinterested curiosity and... Read more
Jay notes that the mid-19th century witnessed shift in the setting of “oracularcentric spectacle” from the “aristocratic court” to the “bourgeois equivalent in the massive sheet glass windows [of department stories] displaying a wealth of commodities to be coveted, and, if money allowed, consumed. Here the dandies’ quest to distinguish themselves by nuances of fashion, visual signifiers of taste and style, became a tantalizing possibilities for the masses . . . . Here the accelerated panoramic view of the railway... Read more
In 1859, Baron George-Eugene Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine, began overhauling Paris. The ultimate result was a masterpiece of urban rationality – straight streets, buildings of the same height, squares, a mappable city. On the way to clarity, though, the city was “rendered illegible,” according to art historian T. J. Clark. He adds that Paris was depicted in the media as “parade, phantasmagoria, dream, dumbshow, mirage, masquerade. Traditional ironies at the expense of the metropolis mingled with new metaphors of... Read more
Knight says that modernity has not left the upper/lower, intelligible/sensible dualism of Platonism behind, but only tipped it on its side. The modern “subject” is a variation on the world of ideas, while the inert “object” corresponds to the lesser reality of the sensible world. Read more
A strict distinction between law and gospel is offered as a prophylactic against works-righteousness. If it is admitted that law is gospel in any sense, all is lost. But this view assumes the very same view of law that it contests. A proponent of works righteousness sees the law as demands that need to be kept, and the end of the law is simply its keeping. The proponent of law/gospel segregation has the same view of law. Both detach law... Read more
In his essay “What is Enlightenment?” Kant described humanity’s coming-of-age. Enlightenment makes man’s deliverance from the tutelage of external authorities and the achievement of mature autonomy. Earlier, Descartes had constructed an entire philosophy on the foundation of “clear and distinct ideas.” The Enlightenment billed itself as the end of blindness and the beginning of effortless, undistorted vision. In these and other ways, the Enlightenment implicitly claimed to have reached the eschaton. Its epistemology was, Knight says, a “beatific vision of... Read more
Since at least Kant, Western theology has been hesitant to talk about salvation in terms of payment, debt, restitution. This helps create and reinforce the separation of public and private, of inner and outer: “We have divided the theological confession of sin. We have invented two parallel worlds, one in which the language of guilt describes our own private emotional state, the other in which the language of credit and debt describes the external world but is not thought to... Read more
Leithart
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