Leithart
Also from John of Salisbury: He attacks teachers who “sift and scrutinize every syllable,” as well as those bloaty-footnoted types who “compile the opinions of all, even the most miserable.” Read more
Also from John of Salisbury: He attacks teachers who “sift and scrutinize every syllable,” as well as those bloaty-footnoted types who “compile the opinions of all, even the most miserable.” Read more
Educational advice from John of Salisbury: “Considerable indulgence must be shown . . . to the young, and loquacity should be tolerated for a time so that they may wax eloquent . . . . As students mature, however, this verbosity ought to be curbed.” Read more
Some quotations from Ivan Illich’s book on Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon : Hugh’s life coincided “with the beginning of the epoch of bookishness which is now closing,” which was “a fleeting but very important moment in the history of the alphabet when, after centuries of Christian reading, the page was suddenly transformed from a score for pious mumblers into an optically organized text for logical thinkers.” For Hugh, reading is a spiritual, corporate, and physical act: (more…) Read more
In 1921, Frank Harris argued that Shakespeare’s art reveals the man: “As it is the object of a general to win battles, so it is the life-work of the artist to show himself to us, and the completeness with which he reveals his own individuality is perhaps the best measure of his own genius.” Rene Weis agrees. He thinks that he can find out a lot about Shakespeare’s personal life because Shakespeare revealed himself in his sonnets and plays. He... Read more
Robert Jenson attempts to expound the attributes of God as explications of the statement “God raised Jesus from the dead by the Spirit.” He objects to the traditional “bipartite classification” systems prevalent in Protestant dogmatics, citing John Gerhard’s distinction between absolute and relative attributes and commending: “This division betrays all to clearly the definition of God himself by abstraction from his relations, against which we have been struggling. We therefore have proposed a different classification, to serve the legitimate part... Read more
In his Systematic Theology , Charles Hodge quotes the following from DF Strauss’s Dogmatik : “The ideas of the absolute and of the holy are incompatible. He who holds to the former must give up the latter, since holiness implies relation; and, on the other hand, he who holds fast the idea of God as holy, must renounce the idea of his being absolute; for the idea of absolute is inconsistent with the slightest possibility of its being other than... Read more
INTRODUCTION These verses are framed by corresponding general exhortations, verses 16 and 23. Both proverbs describe the way to life: Whoever keeps commandments keeps his soul or life (v. 16), and the fear of Yahweh leads to life (v. 23). There is a “what’s more” progression between the two framing verses, as Solomon moves from an exhortation to keep the commandment to a personalized exhortation to fear Yahweh, the God of Israel. (more…) Read more
Even before Cain, there is a hint – only a hint, but a hint – of a better city to come. It is not good for man to be alone, Yahweh says of Adam, and then takes a rib from Adam’s side and makes that rib into a woman. Eve is not a city. But Eve is the prototype of a different sort of city, a bridal city. The hint is in the strange verb that Genesis 2:22 uses. Yahweh... Read more
Girard says that “the Bible unveils the victim mechanism that lies behind polytheism and mythology, but not only behind polytheism and mythology, for its full expression underlies everything we know as human culture. The Bible recognizes this in the story of Cain and Abel. Because Cain murders his brother, God bans him from the soil, making him a wanderer on the earth, and God puts a mark on him, a sign to protect him from suffering what he made Abel... Read more
During much of the modern period, the development of Trinitarian theology has been seen as a “Hellenization” of the original Christian faith. Harnack for instance, “asserts that Logos Christianity, the Nicene dogma of the Trinity, and the Chalcedonian dogma of Christ are the products of ‘acute Hellenization’ that need not be continued forever.” Harnack was his work as a continuation of the Reformation recovery of the purity of biblical teaching, in order to come to an “undogmatic Christianity” that didn’t... Read more
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