In an essay on the Brandenburg Calvinist pastor John Bergius, Bodo Nischan observes that “Unlike most Protestants and Catholics at the time, Bergius did not think that a ruler should impose his religion on his subjects. True faith, he argued, could never be forced on people,” and he charged that Protestant attempts to impose a single faith repeated “the error of the Spanish in America and the Catholics in the empire who were trying to convert people by force.” Rather... Read more
In her editor’s introduction to Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, Candy Gunther Brown observes: “According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals (2006), more than a quarter—and in many countries two-thirds—of the world’s 2 billion Christians identify themselves as Pentecostal or Charismatic.” Of these, “large majorities (more than 70 percent in 8 of 10 countries) of Pentecostals reported having personally experienced or witnessed the divine healing of an illness or... Read more
Candy Gunther Brown’s The Healing Gods is an effort to explain how Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) “entered the American cultural mainstream,” and especially how it achieved “a niche among evangelical and other theologically conservative Christians, although much of CAM is religious but not distinctively Christian and lacks scientific evidence of efficacy and safety.” This is surprising in part because “many CAM providers make religious or spiritual assumptions about why CAM works, assumptions inspired by selective interpretations of multifaceted religious... Read more
In a New Yorker profile of filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester By the Sea), Rebecca Mead calls attention to Lonergan’s interest in depicting the lives of teens, manifest especially in his film Margaret. In Margaret, the lead character, named Lisa, not Margaret, “is, at different points, self-assured, vulnerable, furious, arch, questing, cynical. She adopts different emotional costumes, for fun and for effect, but at any given moment she is behaving with complete sincerity.” “You can just see the framework a little... Read more
In his history of popular culture in early modern Europe, Peter Burke traces what he describes as the “triumph of Lent” during the 17th and 18th centuries. He refers to Brueghel’s painting, Combat of Carnival and Lent and says, “I am tempted to interpret ‘Carnival,’ who belongs to the tavern side of the picture, as a symbol of traditional popular culture, and ‘Lent,’ who belongs to the church side, as the clergy, who at that time (1559) were trying to... Read more
William Henry Green’s 1890 Bibliotecha Sacra essay on “Primeval Chronology” has been a touchstone of evangelical biblical scholarship for over a century, its arguments regularly cited or alluded to by scholars dealing with the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11. In response to skeptical challenges to the historicity of Genesis, Green attempted to show how the Bible could be reconciled to chronologies from other ancient sources that indicate a much longer human history than the Bible does. Green argued that... Read more
In his recently-published Sign and Sacrifice, Rowan Williams notes the continuity between the post-Maccabean theology of martyrdom and the death of Jesus. For intertestamental Jews, as for Romans, death could be noble and triumphant. There’s a radical discontinuity too. For Jews (as for Romans), martyrs triumphed because they died in an effort to liberate their nation from their enemies. Not Jesus: “Jesus did not die defending the nation or the law against foreign oppression. He died because those who ruled... Read more
Rowan Williams (Sign and Sacrifice) summarizes the Anselmian understanding of the atonement using the categories of sacrifice, obedience, and gift, all set within a Trinitarian frame. It’s quite lovely. Citing Hebrews citing Psalm 40, Williams argues that the Old Testament sacrificial system existed to symbolize the true sacrifice of obedience. Obedience is pleasing to God because it is “a reflection of his own love, his glory and his beauty.” Obedience isn’t duty-doing but “a harmony of response to God so... Read more
Helmut Kuhn begins his 1941 article on “true tragedy” by noting the chronological proximity of Plato and Sophocles: “When Sophocles died, Plato had just come of age. So the question naturally arises whether the chronological succession is historically significant. Can we discover a line of development leading from Aeschylus and Sophocles to Plato? Is tragedy among the logical antecedents of Platonic philosophy?” Kuhn thinks the answer is Yes, and argues that “the two creations as subserving a common cause, the... Read more
Describing the assignments of Levite gatekeepers, the Chronicler records that there were four at the “highway” at the western end of the temple, and two “at the Parbar,” which was also on the west (1 Chronicles 26:18). Scholars have proposed a variety of foreign etymologies for the term. From Persian, some have etymologized the word to mean “possessing light,” hence a summer house or open-aired colonnade or porch. Some have suggested an Egyptian origin, a “portable chapel containing a divine... Read more
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