In a penetrating article on de doctrina Christiana , Rowan Williams points out that the grotesqueness and strangeness of the Bible is a “prophylactic against fastidiousness,” particularly the fastidiousness that assumes we have “nothing to learn from what startles or offends our taste.” Read more
Jenson again: Western history teaches that “the experience of beauty does not survive the cessation of worship. Precisely those who thematically dedicate themselves to beauty, and who within the modern Western tradition regularly just so abandon worship, are in wave after wave driven at last to deny beauty as well. The avant-gardes of nineteenth and twentieth-century art have one upon the other denounced beauty, proclaiming that to be art which anybody calls such. And if the one artist hangs a... Read more
Robert Jenson says “It was the great single dogma of late Mediterranean antiquity’s religion and irreligion, that no story can be ‘really’ true of God, that deity equals ‘impassibility.’ It is not merely that the gospel tells a story about the object of worship; every religion of antiquity did that. The gospel identifies God as ‘He who brought Israel from Egypt and our Lord Jesus from the dead.’ Therefore the gospel cannot rescind from its story at any depth whatsoever... Read more
INTRODUCTION God is love, John says, and that love is manifested in history through the Father’s love for the Son, a love expressed in the gift of the Spirit. That eternal familial love of Father and Son in the Spirit is the source and model of all human love. THE TEXT “Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and... Read more
Malachi 1:6-7: A son honors his father, and a servant his master Then if I am a father, where is My honor? And if I am a master, where is My respect? says the LORD of hosts to you, O priests who despise My name. But you say, How have we despised Your name? You are presenting defiled food upon My altar But you say, How have we defiled You? In that you say, The table of the LORD is... Read more
There is no baptism today, but this is our first service in some time without one. We have a lot of small children in this congregation, and that is a great joy and blessing. It is also a great challenge. Think ahead: What will Trinity look like in 13 years, when dozens of mid to late teenagers replace the dozens of small kids? What will they all look like? (more…) Read more
Eco (in a 1981 article in The Bulletin of the Midwest MLA ) surveys the problems of sign theory. A fundamental objection to a general theory of signs is that the concept of “sign” is being used for things that are unlike: For linguistic signs that stand for the things they signify (in a p = q relation), as well as for symptoms from which a physician infers sickness (reasoning from effect to cause), for meteorological indications that enable us... Read more
Linguistic wisdom from Eco: “It is true that signs in themselves, e.g., the words of verbal language in their dictionary form, look like petrified conventions by comparison to the vitality and energy displayed by texts in their production of new sense, where they make signs interact with each other in the light of their previous intertextual history. Texts are the loci where sense is produced. When signs are isolated and removed from the living texture of a text, they do... Read more
INTRODUCTION Waltke points out that alternating verses of this section describe undisciplined and wayward sons and who bring evil to themselves and all those who surround them. The passages progress from the sluggard (v. 24) to the shameful son (v. 26) to the false witness (v. 28) to the brawler (20:1). The scope of damage also widens as well: The sluggard harms himself, the shameful son hurts his parents, a false witness undermines justice and damages the society, and a... Read more
Wallace again on Timon of Athens . Wallace argues that Shakespeare has written a play to explore Seneca’s society of benefits and gratitude, and shows that the classical model of social order is impossible: “the cast would appear to have been designed to test the Senecan hypothesis about the nature of a just society and to find the classical model hopelessly wanting. Natural obligations derived from mutual benefits could never be the basis for a healthy society because mankind is... Read more
Leithart
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