Why grasp the horns of the altar when you’re a fugitive in the temple? How is it legitimate to touch the horns, when the altar as a whole is forbidden to all but the priests? The answer to the first is found in the premise of the second: The altar is holy, and communicates holiness to anyone who touches it (if they aren’t holy already). When a fugitive grasps the horns of the altar, he becomes sanctified and hence inviolable.... Read more
INTRODUCTION Micah prophesies of a “ruler in Israel” (5:2). But to grasp the full promise of this prophecy, we have to read it in the light of Micah’s description of Israel’s current rulers. To put it mildly, they are not pleasant fellows. The Christ is going to come to establish right rule and righteous rulers. THE TEXT “And I said: ‘Hear now, O heads of Jacob, and you rulers of the house of Israel: Is it not for you to... Read more
Feasting and care for the poor have been polarized in contemporary culture. If you’re a “conservative,” you’re in favor of free trade, consumption without guilt, festivity without concern for those who can’t join you, who probably deserve their poverty anyway. If you’re a “liberal,” you renounce festivity because other people are hungry and how dare you eat when someone else isn’t. The Biblical prophets combine a promise of festivity with severe denunciation of greed, luxury, and oppression. But they combine... Read more
Ruth not only points ahead to the union of Jews and Gentiles, but records it. Ruth the Moabitess marries Boaz the Jew – a marital union of Jew and Moabite, and Obed incorporates Jew and Gentile in his own body. Obed, whose name means “servant,” is a type of the coming Servant of Yahweh. Read more
Perhaps the pattern noted earlier can be applied more broadly. Perhaps the incorporation of outsiders is always what spurs God’s return to save the insiders. So, the current moment may not only be one (as Philip Yancy put it) of God moving on from the West to a place where He’s wanted. It may also be that as peoples outside traditional Christendom (Naomi) are incorporated into Christendom (Ruth), not only are they saved but the greater Boas comes to the... Read more
The typological pattern of Ruth is: Naomi, the Jewish widow, is bereft; the Gentile daughter Ruth joins her; Naomi gets a savior when Boaz attaches himself to Ruth . That is, the pattern is not “Savior, then incorporation of Gentiles” but “incorporation of Gentiles, then Savior.” In the fulfillment, it’s both. Jesus comes to bring the Gentiles into full sonship and holiness. But the Ruth pattern is also at work on the larger scale: The incorporation of the Gentile bride... Read more
I’ve been listening all day to piano and orchestral music from several Chinese composers: Shande Ding, Yah-jun Hua, Wen-cheng Lu, Guang Ren, Bi-guang Tang, Lishan Wang, Jianer Zhu. They combine traditional Chinese music with Western forms, and are far more accessible than many contemporary Western composers. They are not naive compositions; the sound palette is formed by modernist dissonance as well as by traditional Western music. But the music is not “challenging” or “subversive.” It aims to be, and is,... Read more
Milbank finds Augustine’s theory of signs unsatisfactory, since signs are there only to “recall res ” and “finally to recall spiritual res in the soul, where Christ speaks, wordlessly.” At the same time, he finds a “counter-failing tendency” in Augustine’s notion of the interior word, since that “construes thought as ‘intentional,’ or as having a sign-character . . . which, especially in the De Trinitate , promotes a non-substantive, relational ontology, together with an account of the ‘inner’ space of... Read more
Augustine is charged with being proto-Cartesian when he locates the imago Dei in the mind or soul. Maybe, but we need to ask what he says about that imago . Among other things, he sees the soul’s capacity to beget an inner word that is both different from and yet consubstantial with the soul as the image. That is, the soul is not an image of God in its pure self-presence, but in its self-differentiation. The mind is image in... Read more
John 6:53: Jesus therefore said to them, Truly, Truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For My flesh is true food and My blood is true drink. We have been reflecting on the early Christian heresy of docetism today, which... Read more
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