Leithart
For the next several weeks, the Christian Century is publishing brief lectionary essays of mine on its blog. You can find a meditation on the readings for June 1 here: http://www.theolog.org/blog/2008/05/blogging-towa-3.html. Read more
For the next several weeks, the Christian Century is publishing brief lectionary essays of mine on its blog. You can find a meditation on the readings for June 1 here: http://www.theolog.org/blog/2008/05/blogging-towa-3.html. Read more
INTRODUCTION Jesus sows the word, and it falls on different sorts of soil. The right response is to give up everything in order to gain the kingdom ( 13:44 -46), but those closest to Jesus scorn Him ( 13:53 -58). THE TEXT “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid; and for joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom... Read more
Matthew 13:33: The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three pecks of meal, until it was all leavened. We noted in the sermon that leaven often represents something dangerous, poisonous, evil, contemptible, unclean, abominable. Leaven was not allowed on the altar of God, and leaven was removed from Israelite’s houses at the beginning of each year. Jesus warns His disciples about the “leaven” of the scribes and Pharisees, their teaching, while the Jews... Read more
As much as pragmatic Americans might wish it to be otherwise, the Bible is not an answer-book. It includes advice, and laws, and rules, but a lot of it consists of puzzling prophecy, ancient history, obscure parables and apparently abstract theology. What are we supposed to get from that? We ask for an answer key, and God gives us poetry. Can’t we just skip the story and get to the moral? No we can’t. (more…) Read more
Athanasius: “the Son is in the Father . . . because the whole being of the Son is proper to the Father’s ousia , as radiance from light and a stream from a fountain; so that whosoever sees the Son, sees what is proper to the Father and knows that the Son’s being, as from the Father, is the Father and is therefore in the Father. For the Father is in the Son, since the Son is what is from... Read more
“Classical theism” is charged with rendering God remote, immovable, unfriendly. But the reality is the opposite; Nicene orthodoxy said God was near, far nearer than Arius wanted Him to be. Thomas Weinandy writes: “The Creed . . . professes that this God who is Father is almighty and thus, contrary to Arrius’ position that God created through his created mediator – the Son, ‘the maker of all things visible and invisible.’ God the Father is transcendent in the sense of... Read more
When Hillary and W. got to college, both had posture photos taken, nude or in underwear. So says M. F. Burnyeat in the May 16 TLS . Burnyeat adds, “Officially, the idea was that the pictures would reveal which students needed remedial treatment for poor posture. In reality, the project was to correlate the students’ undergraduate posture with their success or failure in later life. As the evidece accumulated, it would become possible to predict the Presidential chances of each... Read more
Brian Vickers taught and researched English literature at Zurich for several decades. He is an impressive literary scholar and historian who has written on Shakespeare, rhetoric, tragedy, edited Bacon and others, and produced a nice shelf full of deeply researched books. He also seems to have run out of things to do. Nearly every recent issue of the TLS contains an irritated, erudite, cranky, frequently self-defensive letter from Vickers to the editor. Read more
Postmillennialists like to point out that leaven doesn’t always represent evil or corruption, which is true enough. But it’s hard to avoid the fact that leaven often does represent evil. That might form some of the background to Jesus’ parable of the leaven. David Garland writes: “The parable is not simply a meditation on insignificant beginnings. No reference is made to the small amount of leaven as in 1 Corinthians 5:6 and Galatians 5:9. To compare the kingdom of heaven... Read more
“Sowing” is a common image in the prophets for Israel ’s return from exile. But Matthew 13:38 says that the field is not the land but the “world.” So, I think the sowing is the scattering of the seed of Israel at the time of the exile. Israel is scattered to the four corners of the earth, and begins to grow. All over the Mediterranean , wheat is growing, the wheat of the sons of the kingdom. (more…) Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In