In his Operation Shylock , Philip Roth’s double, Moishe Pipik (Yiddish for “Moses Bellybutton”), advocates a reverse Zionism known as Diasporism. He is encouraging Jews to return to Eastern Europe, and imagines that “People will be jubilant. People will be in tears. They will be shouting, ‘Our Jews are back! Our Jews are back!’” Roth himself appears as a character in the book, and is at first put off by Pipik. Eventually, however, he takes over the leadership of Diasporism,... Read more
Some decades ago, James Barr criticized biblical scholars for a fallacy he labeled “illegitimate totality transfer.” By this phrase, Barr was referring to the habit of some biblical scholars to pack every possible meaning of a word into every context. Lane Keister’s ongoing critique of my work on justification charges me with a form of illegitimate totality transfer. He writes, “What illegitimate totality transfer does is to import all or most of the meanings that a word has into a... Read more
Christian worship is God’s service to us. Yet, Christian worship is sacrificial, and sacrifice appears to be a human act reaching toward God. That’s certainly how Luther understood the sacrifice of the Mass. How to resolve? Teresa Okure, Professor of New Testament and Gender Hermeneutics (!) at the Catholic Institute of West Africa in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, suggests this solution: (more…) Read more
An essay of mine on Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy is currently available on the First Things web site, here: http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/?p=786. Read more
The NT uses the Greek word aggelia twice, both in 1 John (1:5; 3:11). The noun comes from the same root as euaggelion , good news, and Raymond Brown suggests that aggelia is the Johannine equivalent – meaning “good news” or “gospel. If this is true, 1 John’s two uses are intriguing. 1:5 announces the good news that God is light, without shadow or darkness. That is genuinely good news. But 3:11 says that the “good news” takes the form... Read more
In her recent book The Mirror of the Self , Shadi Bartsch argues that ancient notions of introspection and self-examination do not employ the image of the mirror in the way we do in post-Cartesian philosophy. In the words of the TLS reviewer, for the ancients “the mirror was the means by which we come to know our public selves: the self in the mirror was not some unique and authentic self, but the self as seen by others, object... Read more
Wilken summarizes Augustine’s social vision of perfection this way: “This peace for which the city of God yearns is a ‘perfectly ordered and harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God,’ a peace of ‘enjoying one another in God.’ Notice that Augustine’s language is social, not individualistic. He does not say, ‘fellowship with God,’ but enjoying one another in God, or as one translator has it, a ’ mutual fellowship in God.’ Augustine’s controlling metaphor for the new life that God... Read more
When Plato thought about politics, he thought about an ideal city (at least in the Republic ). Not Augustine. Augustine recognized that Plato had portrayed “what kind of city ought there to be.” But Augustine was after something different. He presented an actual human society, a city of God in history, with all the complexities and messiness that entails. Read more
Aquinas wrote: “If the teacher determines the question by appeal to authorities only, the student will be convinced that the thing is so, but will have acquired no knowledge or understanding, and he will go away with an empty mind.” Read more
In his wonderful book, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought , Robert Louis Wilken criticizes the Formula of Chalcedon as “formulaic and abstract,” which described Jesus as “one person,” but “seemed to divide Christ into a divine nature that, for example, healed the sick and raised the dead and a human nature that hungered, thirsted, suffered, and died.” How, he asks, “was the Christ of Chalcedon the man depicted in the gospels?” Though known mostly as a polemicist, Cyril of... Read more
Leithart
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