You are salt: Jesus is at the altar, considering the salt that is added to the offerings. The earth is the altar, the nations the sacrifice (Romans 16), and the disciples of Jesus the flavoring on the offering. You are a light on a lamp: Jesus is in the Holy Place, considering the menorah and the light that fills the house. Jesus’ disciples are set in the firmament of the Holy Place, shining to fill the house of creation. Think... Read more
In her critical study of sociology’s understanding of time, Barbara Adam contrasts the multiform experience of time in life with the much thinner understanding of time in theory: “In everyday life . . . time can mean a variety of things. We can have a ‘good time at a party,’ be ‘on time for work,’ ‘lose time’ due to illness, choose the ‘right time’ to plant potatoes, and even live on ‘borrowed time.’ We can make time pass quickly or... Read more
INTRODUCTION Jesus came to fulfill the law and prophets, not to abolish them. Beginning in 5:21, He shows in some detail what that means. THE TEXT “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder, and whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment.’ But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment . . . .” (Matthew 5:21-30). (more…) Read more
2 Corinthians 2:15-16: For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one an aroma from death to death, to the other an aroma from life to life. And who is adequate for these things? The world was created to be a holocaust to its Creator, a living breathing tasty and aromatic sacrifice to the Lord of heaven and earth. On this great offering, the disciples... Read more
Ezekiel 16: 3-6: Thus says the Lord GOD to Jerusalem: Your birth and your nativity are from the land of Canaan; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. As for your nativity, on the day you were born your navel cord was not cut, nor were you washed in water to cleanse you; you were not rubbed with salt nor wrapped in swaddling cloths. No eye pitied you, to do any of these things for you, to... Read more
Most of the Beatitudes in Matthew are stated in third person. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” ” They shall be comforted,” ” they shall inherit the earth,” ” they shall be called the sons of God.” At the end, Jesus changes the person of his address, and begins to speak to the persecuted directly: “Blessed are you .” And he continues the second-person address: ” You are the salt of the earth,”... Read more
One of the best discussions of Augustine’s views on time comes from Jeremy Begbie’s Theology, Music, and Time (ch. 3). Following Ricoeur’s discussion, Begbie claims that Augustine’s distentio “is conceived as the three-fold present, and the threefold present as distentio . The distentio consists in the non-coincidence of the mind’s three modes of action. They are in discord. As we attend to impressions, expectation and memory pull in opposite directions: in the process of reciting a psalm, ‘the scope of... Read more
John Rist offers some important insights into Augustine’s view of time. He notes, as many commentators do, that Augustine is not aiming to provide a definition of time but to answer the question of how time can be measured. The dilemma is: If the past no longer is, and the future is not yet, and the present is constantly shifting, then it seems as if time is not available at all to be measured. Yet, we measure time; we speak... Read more
In a 1957 essay in Man and Time , Gilles Quispel claims that Augustine’s views of time have been extracted from the “great struggle between a cyclical and a historical view of the world, between archaism and Christianity,” and therefore have been misunderstood. Augustine “comes to grips with the Neoplatonists and turns time inward in order to make room for eschatology.” (more…) Read more
Augustine argues in Confessions that time is not reducible to the movement of the celestial bodies. Aristotle agreed; but, as Ricoeur points out, the arguments that Augustine used departed radically from Aristotle. First, if the sun and stars stopped moving, and yet a potter’s wheel continued to move, time would continue. As Ricoeur says, by this argument “the stars are thus reduced to the level of other things in motion.” Second, Augustine hypothesizes about days of greater or lesser length.... Read more
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