Mutual Honor

Last updated on: August 5, 2018 at 7:55 am By Peter Leithart

Yahweh speaks the Ten Words to his son, Israel.

The Words are ultimately pointing to the Son, who takes flesh to become true Israel. The Ten Words speak of Jesus, and Jesus is the final interpretation of their demands.

“Honor your father and your mother,” the Lord says, and Jesus embodies perfect honor to His father and mother.

Jesus slips away from his parents while they’re in Jerusalem, demonstrating, as Barth says, that children may honor their parents against their own parents’ will and knowledge. They may be called to honor their parents by honoring the heavenly Father more.

It’s in Jesus’ relation to His heavenly Father, though, that we see the full meaning of the fifth commandment.

Jesus glorifies His Father. His meat is to do the Father’s will. With every breath, He keeps the fifth commandment.

But Jesus’ relation to His Father shows that the Fifth Word is fulfilled only in reciprocity and mutuality. Jesus glorifies the Father as the Father glorifies the Son (John 17). Jesus hears the Father and does what He commands; but the Father’s ear is toward Jesus.

This has profound import for parenting. If parents are hyper-critical of their children, they’ll be criticized by their children. If parents don’t listen to their children, they won’t be listened to. If they judge harshly, their children will judge them harshly. If they denigrate, they shouldn’t expect to be honored. Parents who belittle and criticize shouldn’t expect to be praised.

Parents reap what they sow.

If you want respect, show respect. If you want your kids to listen, listen to them. If you want honor, show honor. If you want your children to act like the Son, start acting like the Father.

Mutual honor between parents and children – that’s a reflection of the life of God.

Hopkins and Typology

Last updated on: July 15, 2018 at 3:30 am By Peter Leithart

George Landow argues (Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows) that the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins would look less bizarre, though no less innovative, if we placed Hopkins more firmly in the poetics of his time. Which is to say, placed him in the context of a typological poetics.

Hopkins’s “entire conception of inscape and its relation to the structure of a poem seems to develop from a mind accustomed to seeking types and figures of Christ” (7). Landow cites “The Windover” as an illustration of the method: Hopkins “elaborately presents the senuous, visible details of a really existing thing – here the hawk – and then makes us realize the elaborate Christian significance of each detail, as (like a type) the image of the bird is ‘completed’ only by reference to Christ” (7).

The typology is more explicit in the final lines:

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Landow notes, “the basic of generating conceit of ‘The Windover’ is that higher beauty and higher victory come forth only when something – say, a hawk, an ember, or clump of soil – is subjected to great pressure and crushed or bruised” (7). Only when the hawk “falls” and “galls” does it “gash gold-vermillion,” bursting forth with greater glory.

The conceit is found also in “God’s Grandeur”:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The grandeur of God flames out when, gathered like an ooze of oil to its “greatness,” it is “crushed.” As Landow says, Hopkins alludes here to Genesis 3:15, a favorite passage of victorian preachers and poets; the crushed seed of the woman bursts with the grandeur of God. That “oil” is doubtless an allusion to the “christic” character of God’s glory, its focus on the glory of the crucified, the crushed Christ.

The hopeful second stanza also trades in typology. Commerce and toil have “bleared” and “smeared” a world charged with God’s grandeur, but “nature is never spent.” Hope for renewal doesn’t lie in some potency of nature but in what lives “deep down things,” the freshening Spirit, the Spirit who broods over the tired world as He did at the beginning, to make it new.

Or, we can read the stanza Christologically. Light fades in the west, but morning breaks in the east, the morning of Easter. Landow connects the brooding Spirit with the “crushing” of Jesus in Gethsemane (the garden of the wine press), the crushing that forces new glory into view.

Types of Color

Last updated on: July 15, 2018 at 2:47 am By Peter Leithart

John Ruskin was the main art critic of his time; he was an artists himself, and also wrote on a variety of other topics, especially on the state of English politics and economy. He abandoned explicit attachment to Evangelical Christianity but remained deeply indebted. He provides an excellent example of the persistence of typological structures of thought into the latter part of the nineteenth century, when orthodox Christianity was in something of a decline.

In his discussion of the paintings of JMW Turner in Modern Painters, Ruskin raises a fundamental question about painting: “what is the true dignity of color?” Turner’s achievement is found specifically on this point. Ruskin claims that “Other painters had rendered the golden tones, and the blue tones, of sky; Titian especially the last, in perfectness. But none had dared to paint, none seem to have seen, the scarlet and purple.”

But it wasn’t just in color itself that Turner excelled. He was especially skilled in working out colors in shadows. “His most distinctive innovation as a colorist was his discovery of the scarlet shadow. ‘True, there is a sunshine whose light is golden, and its shadow gray; but there is another sunshine, and that the purest, whose light is white, and its shadow scarlet.’ This was the essentially offensive, inconceivable thing, which he could not be believed in.”

Turner’s scarlet was distinctive, and this is important because the range of red is the most subtle of the primary colors: “red is an entirely abstract color. It is red to which the color-blind are blind, as if to show us that it was not necessary merely for the service or comfort of man, but that there was a special gift or teaching in this color.”

When he explains why red is such a fundamental color, Ruskin turns to Leviticus: “color generally, but chiefly the scarlet, used with the hyssop, in the Levitical law, is the great sanctifying element of visible beauty inseparably connected with purity and life.” He is referring to the rite for the concoction of the water for purification, found in Numbers 19. Scarlet material is thrown on a fire with hyssop, and together they are burned with a red cow. The ashes are mixed with water and the mixture is used to cleanse from corpse defilement. Red thus is a sign of purification, and also a sign of resurrection, a return to life.

In a lengthy aside, he explains that color is less important to a painter than form. If forced to choose, the painter should master form. What makes the leopard isn’t the spots on his skin; the form of the leopard designates the existence, the being of the leopard. The color of his skin is the “purifying” or “sanctifying” element.

He further justifies this linkage of color, and red specifically, with purity, by reference to the rainbow.

“The cloud, or firmament, as we have seen, signifies the ministration of the heavens to man. That ministration may be in judgment or mercy—in the lightning, or the dew. But the bow, or color, of the cloud, signifies always mercy, the sparing of life; such ministry of the heaven, as shall feed and prolong life. And as the sunlight, undivided, is the type of the wisdom and righteousness of God, so divided, and softened into color by means of the firmamental ministry, fitted to every need of man, as to every delight, and becoming one chief source of human beauty, by being made part of the flesh of man;—thus divided, the sunlight is the type of the wisdom of God, becoming sanctification and redemption. Various in work—various in beauty—various in power.

“Color is, therefore, in brief terms, the type of love. Hence it is especially connected with the blossoming of the earth; and again, with its fruits; also, with the spring and fall of the leaf, and with the morning and evening of the day, in order to show the waiting of love about the birth and death of man.”

Perhaps this is no more than an extended metaphor. But it seems more integral to Ruskin’s theory of color and art. How does he arrive, after all, at the notion that color is “sanctifying” and “purification”? How does he know that color is linked to love? Those suggestions seem to arise from biblical texts. And the more extended understanding of color as an image of the refraction of divine love is clearly rooted in this meditation on the rainbow. Color as a representation of the “ministrations of heaven to earth”; the difference between the un-refracted light of judgment and the refracted light of mercy; the link between color and love – all these depend on an extension of the scene in Genesis 8 where the rainbow is set in the sky as a memorial of God’s mercy.

The rainbow, unlike many biblical types, is rooted in a natural phenomenon rather than an “accident” of history. As George Landow puts it (Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows, 112-3): “The rainbow, a sign of God’s covenant with man, was interpreted by Christian exegetes as a type of Christ, who both brought the new covenant of grace and was Himself its sign. What distinguishes the rainbow from almost all other types is that it is a natural phenomenon, not a unique event or person, which prefigures Christ. . . . it serves as a major example of something which functions typologically in both of God’s books – the Bible and the Book of Nature.” Ruskin pushes this understanding further, finding aesthetic significance in the specifics of the natural phenomenon of the rainbow, interpreted through the lens of the covenantal interpretation.

Ruskin returns to the rainbow in another discussion of color in the Stones of Venice. He explicates his claim that “I know no law more severely without exception than this of the connexion of pure color with profound and noble thought.” Why is there such a connection between color and nobility? There is, Ruskin says, “a noble reason for this universal law.” When he explains this “noble reason,” he resorts to the Bible:

“In that heavenly circle which binds the statutes of color upon the front of the sky, when it became the sign of the covenant of peace, the pure hues of divided light were sanctified to the human heart for ever; nor this, it would seem, by mere arbitrary appointment, but in consequence of the fore-ordained and marvellous constitution of those hues into a sevenfold, or, more strictly still, a threefold order, typical of the Divine nature itself. Observe also, the name Shem, or Splendor, given to that son of Noah in whom this covenant with mankind was to be fulfilled, and see how that name was justified by every one of the Asiatic races which descended from him. Not without meaning was the love of Israel to his chosen son expressed by the coat ‘of many colors’; not without deep sense of the sacredness of that symbol of purity, did the lost daughter of David tear it from her breast:—’With such robes were the king’s daughters that were virgins apparelled.’ We know it to have been by Divine command that the Israelite, rescued from servitude, veiled the tabernacle with its rain flashed through the fall of the color from its tenons of gold.”

This dense passage begins from Genesis 8, when by God’s promise the colors of the rainbow were “sanctified to the human heart.” But this wasn’t an arbitrary, nominalist assignment of meaning; the threefold order of the rainbow was rooted in “divine nature itself.” Joseph’s robe was a sign of his father’s favor; David’s daughters exhibited their status in rainbow coats; the tabernacle was another rainbow, forming the sanctuary where the Lord would meet with his redeemed son Israel, clothed like Joseph in a coat of many colors.

The style of citation here doesn’t seem merely illustrative. The Bible provides the “noble reason” for a universal association between color and nobility. Typologically read, the colors of the rainbow provide a key to understanding the impact of color in painting.

Victorian Typology

Last updated on: July 13, 2018 at 9:37 pm By Peter Leithart

Typology was a traditional method of reading Scripture, one that persisted into the Victorian age. Most obviously, this took the traditional form of finding shadowy figures of Christ in Old Testament characters and institutions and promises.

J.C. Ryle, a leading Evangelical Anglican, claimed that one “golden chain” runs through the whole of Scripture – it is entirely about Christ: “no salvation excepting by Jesus Christ. The bruising of the serpent’s head, foretold in the days of the fall, – the clothing of our first parents with skins, – the sacrifices of Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, – the Passover and all the particulars of the Jewish law, -the high-priest, -the altar, -the daily offering of the lamb, -the holy of holies entered only by blood, – the scapegoat . . . all preach with one voice, salvation only by Jesus Christ” (quoted in Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows, 32-33).

John Henry Newman, who famously converted to Roman Catholicism after lead the “Tractarian” or “Oxford” movement within the Church of England, had an Evangelical background and his training in Scripture, as well as Evangelical fervor, stayed with him through his various conversions. In one of his sermons, he explained how Moses served as a type of Christ. Deliverance from Egyptian slavery clearly “prefigures to us the condition of the Christian Church! We are by nature in a strange country; God was our first Father, and His Presence our dwelling-place? But we were case out of Paradise for sinning, and are in a dreary land, a valley of darkness and the shadows of death. We are born in this spiritual Egypt, the land of strangers . . . and by nature slaves we are, slaves to the Devil. He is our hard task-master, as Pharaoh oppressed the Israelites” (quoted in Landow, 23-24).

For Henry Melvill, a Church of England priest and head of the East India Company at one time, taught and preached typological reading. This provided an explanation, he said, for why certain episodes were included in the Bible in the first place: “We are not to regard the Scriptural histories as mere registers of facts, such as are commonly the histories of eminent men: they are rather selections of facts, suitableness for purposes of instruction having regulated the choice. . . . Perhaps more frequently than is commonly thought, it is because the fact has a typical character that it is selected for insertion: it prefigures, or symbolically represents, something connected with the Scheme of Redemption, and on this account has found space in the sacred volume” (quoted in Landow, 38).

One of the masterpieces of this period, Patrick Fairbairn’s Typology in Scripture, first published in 1845, remains in print to this day.

Typology wasn’t simply a general hermeneutical system. Certain readings of passages became standard. The animal skins given to Adam and Eve outside the garden were seen as types of the righteousness of Christ.

Moses striking the rock had a variety of uses. It was often taken as a type of the historical event of the cross. Henry Melvill wrote of this passage: “It is generally allowed that this rock in Horeb was typical of Christ; and that the circumstances of the rock yielding no water, until smitten by the rod of Moses, represented the important truth, that the Mediator must receive the blows of the law, before He could be the source of salvation to a parched and perishing world” (quoted in Landlow, 67).

Charles Spurgeon applied the typology personally to the experience of individual believers. Each convert is like one of the Isarelites in the wilderness, looking to the Rock that is Jesus to provide refreshment in a dry and arid land: “O! blessed Jesus, thou art indeed a sweet antitype of the rock. Once my thirsty soul clamoured for something to satisfy its wants; I hungered and I thirsted for righteousness; I looked to the heavens, but they were as brass, for an angry God seemed to be frowning on me; I looked to the earth, but it was as arid sand, and my good works failed me. . . . But well I remember when my thirsty soul fainted within me, and God said, ‘Come, hither, sinner, I will show thee where thou mayest drink,’ and he showed my Christ on his cross, with his side pierced and his hands nailed. . . . You see, then, beloved, that this rock is a type of Christ personally, it is type of him dying, smitten for our sins” (quoted Landow, 69-70).

This personalized typology took hymnic form in William William’s “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah”: “Open now the crystal Fountain, / Whence the healing streams do flow; / Let the fiery cloudy pillar / Lead me all my journey through.”

More innovatively, some Victorians transformed the scene into a type of the softening of a stony heart, whether the heart was softened by conversion or by some other event of life. In the sixth book of Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814), Ellen tells her mother that God has given grace to help her bear the pain of lover’s betrayal. It’s an example of typology being put to “secular” use, as an image of a lover’s recovery from romantic depression:

There was a stony region in my heart;

But He, at whose command the parched rock

Was smitten, and poured forth a quenching stream,

Hath softened that obduracy, and made

Unlooked-for gladness in the desert place,

To save the perishing (quoted Landow, 81).

This mode of reading cultivated certain habits of mind among Victorians (summary of the work of George Landow). Typology provided a poet with an array of “stock images” that could be drawn on and applied to fresh situations, sometimes quite different from the original setting of orthodox Christianity.

Typology implied a certain understanding of time and existence – that the past prefigured the future – and this contributed to “an entire worldview, an entire imaginative universe” (94). In a typological universe, everything had significance, no matter how trivial it may seem. In a typological universe, events in history, or physical realities, were replete with spiritual or transcendent significance. Typology provided a way for Victorians to hold together matter and spirit, earth and heaven, religious and political life in a complex unity.

For orthodox Christians, typology understood in this fashion was a way of affirming that all things have their coherence in Christ. For those who left orthodoxy but retained the typological imagination, it was a way of affirming the unity of the world, perhaps against the fragmentations of modernity.

Century of the Bible

Last updated on: July 7, 2018 at 7:32 pm By Peter Leithart

Brian Stanley (Christianity in the Twentieth Century) is aware that the “Bible is the fountainhead of all Christian traditions,” perennially central to the church’s life. But he suggests that “the twentieth century may have a better claim than any other to be labeled the century of the Bible” (9).

He elaborates: “In the course of the century more peoples received the Scriptures in their own language than in any preceding century. As they did so, biblical narratives and the stories of their own history – in the case of African peoples, frequently painful ones of enslavement and colonization – began to interact with one another in ways that had profound implications both for their understanding of the Christian faith and for their own developing sense of nationhood” (9).

Protestant Bible societies were at the forefront of this expansion but “it is worth remembering that the British and Foreign Bible Society was happy to cooperate with Orthodox and Catholic as well as Protestant churches, and that even some Catholic bishops supported modern Bible translations” (9).

The distribution of the Bible had a global political impact: “Modern vernacular translations of the Bible contributed to the formation of ethnolinguistic identity and hence national consciousness, not simply in areas of Protestant dominance such as Korea or parts of tropical Africa, but also in Orthodox Serbia or Catholic Croatia, where the first vernacular Bibles had been published in 1868 and 1895 respectively” (9).

Vatican II “lifted many of the traditional restraints on lay Catholic engagement with the biblical text, opening the door to new styles of popular Catholicism such as those fashioned by the Base Ecclesial Communities in Latin America.” Partly through its encouragement of Bible study, the Council provoked “an upheaval in the tectonics of Christian confessionalism . . . narrowing the old fault lines between Catholic and Protestant, while pushing up new ones between contrasting styles of Roman Catholic” (9-10).

Stanley returns to the point later in a discussion of the prophetic movements in Africa. “The role of the Bible societies in effecting the transformation of Christianity into a global religion,” he writes, “is still undervalued. Societies such as the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), the American Bible Society (1916) and, more recently, the Wycliffe Bible Translators (1942) have supplied the vernacular scriptures without which Christianity could never have taken its current shape as a multicultural religion” (59).

The impact of Bible translation was massive: “As Bible translations into a host of non-European languages multiplied in the course of the twentieth century, the Bible ceased to be a European book. Or, to be more accurate, it finally became recognized for what it always had been – a book (or library of books) rooted in the Semitic cultures of western Asia and whose central themes resonated with the everyday concerns of many ‘primal’ peoples” (61).

Readers in Africa and elsewhere concluded that some of the key figures of European Christianity – priests and pastors – were “largely absent” from the Bible. Instead, they found evangelists and prophets. Reflecting what they saw in the Bible, Africans made the twentieth century “the age of the evangelist and the prophet” (61).

The church’s growth in Africa, Asia, and Oceania “was the result of the unspectacular witness of indigenous leaders of minimal theological education but abundant zeal . . . whose only textbooks were a vernacular catechism for Catholics, New Testament or Bible for Protestants, and sometimes a hymnbook” (61). Plenty, as it turned out, to turn millions to Jesus and to alter the fact of global Christianity.

The Picture of Epistemology

Last updated on: July 9, 2018 at 7:54 pm By Peter Leithart

Modern epistemology operates, Charles Taylor argues (A Secular Age); he covers some of the same ground in Retrieving Realism), within a “closed world system” (CWS). CWS describes the various “ways of restricting our grasp of things which are not recognized as such” (551).

When one operates within a CWS, his “thinking is clouded or cramped by a powerful picture which prevents one seeing important aspects of reality.” For those within the system, the perspective seems natural and obvious. But that sense of obviousness is itself a sign that the system is closed to other data (551). Reality is always richer and more complex than our systems.

The “closed” part means that the system is closed off to intimations of transcendence, closed off to anything that might exceed the system.

What are the features of the framework of modern epistemology? In some cases “this structure operates with a picture of knowing agents as individuals who build up their understanding through combining and relating, in more and more comprehensive theories, the information which they take in, and which is couched in inner representations, be these conceived as mental pictures (in earlier variants), or as something like sentences held true in the more contemporary versions” (557-8).

Epistemology assumes a set of “priority relations.” Knowledge of the self is prior to knowledge of the external world and of others. Knowing of neutral facts comes before the attribution of values. And knowledge of “this world” precedes any inference about realities that transcend this world (558).

These priorities aren’t just about logical or temporal precedence. The picture operates as a CWS, and the priority relations govern what inferences might be made from my knowledge. If I know myself before the world, and facts before meanings and values, then it’s “obvious that the inference to the transcendent is at the extreme and most fragile end of a chain of inferences; it is the most epistemologically questionable” (558). The structure of epistemology makes arguments for the existence of God seem weak.

But that appearance depends on the viability of the epistemological picture with its CWS. And that picture has been subjected to devastating critique in modern philosopher. Taylor isolates three elements of the critique:

1.”Our grasp of the world does not consist simple of our holding inner representations of our reality.” We do have these representations, but they make sense because they are “thrown up in the course of an ongoing activity of coping world, as bodily, social and cultural beings” (558). This coping cannot be reduced to representations.

2. This coping isn’t carried out simply by individuals. Rather “we are each inducted into a set of practices of coping as social ‘games’ or activities.” We might assume a stance as individuals, but more fundamentally “we are part of social action” (558).

3. As we cope with the world, the things we encounter are not “objects” but “pragmata” (Heidegger), things that have “relevance, meaning, significance for us” from the get-go, “not as an add-on.” Treating the hammer as an object comes later, on reflection; but my first interaction with its is that it is useful for driving nails and that the handle nestles into my hand.

If we are “agents coping with a world,” then the skeptical response makes no sense: “it makes no sense to doubt [the world], since we are dealing with it.” There’s no gap opened up between inner representations and outer world. Further, there’s no priority of fact over value, or of individual knowing over social. And all this undermines the closed character of knowing; it breaks open the CWS to transcendence (559).

For the deconstructors, epistemology seem “a most massive self-blindness.” Typically, Taylor points to the ethic that drives epistemology: “experience is carved into shape by a powerful theory which posited the primacy of the individual, the neutral, the intra-mental as the locus of certainty.” What drives the their are “certain ‘values,’ virtues, excellences: those of the individual, disengaged subject, reflexively controlling his own thought-processes, ‘self-responsibly,’ in Husserl’s famous phrase” (559).

Behind epistemology is an ethic of “independence, self-control, self-responsibility, of a disengagement that brings control; a stance that requires courage, the refusal of the easy comforts of conformity to authority, of the consolations of an enchanted world, of the surrender to the promptings of the senses” (559-60).

Epistemology is bewitched by a picture (Wittgenstein). But what keeps people attached to the picture is the powerful force of the ethic.

Rahab

Last updated on: July 3, 2018 at 5:09 pm By Peter Leithart

Andrzej Toczyski’s The “Geometrics” of the Rahab Story offers an insightful, multi-layered close reading of Joshua 2.

His syntactical analysis of the chapter examines the features of the text that steer the reader’s involvement in the story. His aim is to show how Joshua has been and is a “vehicle of literary communication.” The book includes detailed discussions of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern readings of the chapter, as well as Toczyski’s own discussion.

He devotes a section of his own reading to a discussion of the chronological obscurities of the story: “In the first chapter, Joshua announced the crossing of the Jordan in three days (cf. Josh 1:11). Presumably on the same day, he sent the spies. . . . After leaving Jericho, they stayed in the mountains for the three days (cf. Josh 2:22) and only then returned to Joshua. This implies that their mission has taken at least three days.” Yet, “in the third chapter the reader is informed that the Israelite camp is still in Shittim, as if time had stopped, and will move next day to the riverbank and eventually cross the river again only after three days.”

Toczyski doesn’t try to harmonize the chronology (which he thinks impossible) but asks about the literary effect of this chronological puzzle. It suggests, he thinks, that the ordering of these chapters is more thematic than chronological, and forces the “critical reader” to ask why the Rahab story is embedded in the place that it is.

His answer is very stimulating. First, he notes that “the book of Joshua occupies a strategic position in the mega-narrative Genesis–Joshua–2 Kings as it describes the realization of repeatedly foretold promises of the Land.” Being at the beginning of this strategic book, the story of Rahab “occupies the ‘key position’ just before that promise becomes true. In other words, the Rahab story in its present context marks the boundary between the promise of the Land and its fulfilment.”

He links this to the use of the phrase “hear a report” in Joshua. Each time it’s used, the phrase “introduces different objects of what exactly have been heard and hence caused a specific response.” Further, “there is a certain progression from the events which had happened in the remote history to those more recent in relation to the hearer(s).” The progression is as follows:

1)Crossing of the Red Sea and victories beyond the Jordan

2) Crossing of the Jordan river

3) General reference which can apply to the conquest of Jericho and Ai or to the reading of the law in Josh 8:30–35

4) The conquest of Jericho and Ai

5) The conquest of Jericho and Ai and the alliance of Gibeonites with Israel

6) General reference which apply to diverse victories of Joshua

In short, as Joshua progresses, “‘the story’ forges ahead to tell how God assisted and led his people from the crossing of the Red Sea through the crossing of the Jordan and beyond.” It’s “like a ‘pile of fire’ or ‘hornets,’ which wreak more havoc than the troops of Joshua.”

The story has different effects on different hearers. Some ally with Israel (Rahab, Gibeonites) while others are frightened or provoked into resistance. It’s the story that changes Rahab: Because of the story, she renounces Jericho and boldly takes up Israel’s cause. (NT gloss: James says she had faith, and faith comes by hearing! Plug in too Matthew Bates’s claim that “faith” implies “loyalty.”)

Toczyski observes that “Rahab and Joshua are the only characters whose proper names are explicitly mentioned in the story.” That not only indicates Rahab’s importance in the narrative, but hints that the name itself might be significant. The word means “wide” or “opened,” and may refer to the “openness” of her profession. Her name is given immediately after we learn that she is a prostitute.

On the other hand, “Rahab” could point to positive character qualities: “it can underline interior qualities of the character such as openness, kindness and hospitality.” Further, he name might reveal ” he deepest theology of the book of Joshua, namely, that the land ‘lies opened’ for Israelites. In fact, the verbs built from the same letters as Rahab’s name were used inter alia to describe the expanse of the land” (Genesis 26:22; Exodus 34:24). When Joshua send the spies, they learn that in fact the land is “rahab” opened for them, ripe for the picking.

The fact that Rahab is a Canaanite suggests another dimension of her name: “the Land is also ‘wide’ and ‘spacious’ to accommodate both parties within it, though only if they come to terms. The case of Rahab and the Gibeonites clearly shows that it is possible.”

The text is written in such a way as to polarize Rahab and the king of Jericho. We read of the king’s command, but we never learn that the command was delivered; we read only Rahab’s response, and assume that the messenger relayed the king’s order. Thus, “by bypassing the moment of delivery, the narrator accelerates the action and enhances the reader’s instantaneous impression that the matter is playing out directly between Rahab and the king.”

Rahab in fact takes command from the king, suggesting that the soldiers go search for the spies. Yet she seizes the initiative by playing on female stereotypes. “Oh, I declare. I didn’t know they were spies, honey. Oh, I wouldn’t’a let them go if I knew they were spies” (spoken in a breathy Gone-With-the-Wind Southern accent).

The crux of the whole narrative is Rahab’s account of the story, of what she heard (Joshua 2:8-13). This comes at the chiastic center of the story, when we have already seen the panic that the spies arouse in Jericho. Only when we hear Rahab’s explanation, though, do we know why the king is so anxious.

The emphasis on the “story” also highlights a crucial aspect of the conquest. It’s a military operation, to be sure. But it’s also a propaganda campaign, organized by Yahweh and not by Joshua. Rumors spread, hearts melt, some ally with Israel, others flee. It’s conquest by word, conquest by the good news of the Exodus.

For Rahab, the story is also critical: “the story/report transformed Rahab’s worldview and had shaken her previous reliance on the local deities. Her faith and dream about a different life was shaped by actively listening to that story, which later pushed her to ally with newcomers.”

Crazy Talk on China

Last updated on: July 3, 2018 at 4:29 pm By Peter Leithart

David Goldman is a conservative and a patriot, and is not given to hyperbole. But he describes the current US attitude toward Chinas a “xenophobic” and “ugly,” and accuses fellow conservative Victor Davis Hanson of “crazy talk” about China.

In response to Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods, “Chinese officials are warning that they are prepared not only for trade war, but for financial, diplomatic and limited military confrontation with the United States, in response to American demands for fundamental changes in Chinese economic policy.”

The U.S. has been taken by surprise as China has moved from “the smokestack-and-export model introduced in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping to a high-tech, consumer-focused model.” America “ignored China’s high-tech shift for years; now it has discovered that China threatens to leapfrog the United States in critical areas of high technology, military as well as civilian.”

American leaders thus misconstrue the balance of power: “The United States still believes it is powerful enough to bully China into submission, while the Chinese believe they are strong enough to come out on top in a confrontation with the United States.” Goldman thinks the Chinese are more realistic.

An economist in Chinas’s Trade Ministry, Mei Xinyu, explains the differences between Sin0-American relations in 2018 and in the 1990s, when there were trade conflicts between the two countries: “When we had our first trade conflicts with the US in the 1990s, the US economy was 15 times bigger than the Chinese. Today it is 1.5 times bigger. Not that we wanted a trade war back then – we could not afford it. Today we can afford it. The export share of our gross domestic product has dropped to below 20 percent since the peak of the early 1990s.”

As the Chinese see it, the U.S. isn’t looking for specific trade concessions, but trying to direct the course of Chinese economic development: “Beijing has concluded that Washington does not want specific trade concessions, the official continued, but rather wants China to abandon its economic policy of subsidizing nascent industries and acquiring advanced technology – in effect giving up its plans for economic development, in the Chinese perception.”

The xenophobia and crazy talk are evident at the “fringes” of the Trump administration. Hanson has asked, “why do we have a million Chinese nationals in the United States? Why are Chinese nationals buying property all over? If you’re a member of the Chinese Communist Party, maybe you can’t come to the United States. Maybe you can’t buy property.”

Goldman considers this “crazy talk,” not least because important sectors of the American economy depend on Chinese students: “About 350,000 Chinese students now study at American universities, and they dominate tech disciplines. Only 7% of American students major in engineering vs. a third in China.”

It’s self-defeating too because many of these Chinese students would be delighted to devoted their talents to helping the U.S., rather than supporting the oppressive regime in China. As Goldman wryly puts it, “If you want American patriots who will devote their talents to building American strategic superiority, you may have to look for them among foreigners who are weary of the oppressiveness of their own governments.”

Goldman suggests that the the U.S. attempt to wean Chinese students away from China, force a “brain drain,” similar to the Allied siphoning of German engineers during World War II. He cites Ian Jacob’s old quip that the Allies won the war because “our German scientists were better than their German scientists.”

Goldman states his own position: “As an American, I want China to be prosperous, secure, and well behind the United States.” Given the repressiveness of China, this is the right position.

But that needs to be qualified: It’s the right position for the time being. If the church continues its current trajectory in China, it can’t help but have a dramatic impact on political culture. In the long run, it would be no shame for the U.S. to take second position to a China infused with Christianity.

That’s a distant prospect, perhaps a very distant one. But it would be dangerous for the U.S. to insist on global hegemony no matter what. That would be another kind of crazy talk.

Paul’s Theology of Glory

Last updated on: July 3, 2018 at 2:12 am By Peter Leithart

Haley Goranson Jacob’s Conformed to the Image of His Son is an exploration of Paul’s theology of glory. Jacob’s focus is on the meaning of the phrase in her title, drawn from Romans 8. She finds the several common interpretations of the phrase wanting: Conformity to the Son isn’t physical conformity to His resurrection body, not simply moral conformity, not merely sharing in His eschatological radiance, not sharing in His sufferings.

Jacob instead develops and defends a “functional” understanding of the phrase. Believers are “conformed to his status and function as the Son of God who rules over creation” (10). It refers to a “vocational participation” in Christ, our “active share in the resurrection life and glory of Christ as redeemed humans in him” (15).

Psalms 89 and 110 lurk in the background, as Paul identifies Jesus with the Davidic “firstborn” and proclaims the good news of our vocational participation in His reign. Jesus is the “highest of the kings of the earth” and “stands as the representative of a new family of God and a redeemed humanity” (16). To say that we are “co-heirs” with Christ, and “co-glorified” with Him is to say that we “participate with the Son in his rule over creation as people renewed in the image of God” (16). Jesus is the Last Adam; in Him we are restored to Adamic glory and rule.

Our role as “viceregents of God” isn’t merely eschatological but present. We are glorified now, “in the prayers of believers and the Spirit . . . and in God’s working all things toward good” (16-17).

Exegetically, Jacob’s work focuses on Romans 8. She argues that “sonship” (adoption) is part of a new exodus theme running through Romans. Receiving the Spirit of sonship, believers are “co-heirs” of God – not that God is the substance of their inheritance but that they receive the inheritance God promised, already defined in Romans 4 as “the world.” Our inheritance isn’t our own; it is our “brother’s, the Firstborn’s inheritance” (212) and we share in it only by union with Him.

But what does it mean for believers to inherit the world, an inheritance that Jacob insists is a present as well as an eschatological reality? She complains about the “spiritualization” of inheritance in various commentators, and concludes that we inherit what Christ inherited, “universal sovereignty” (217). In sum, “in their adoption as children of God in the Firstborn Son of God, believers are given their portion of the inheritance: participation in the Messiah’s ‘universal sovereignty'” (218).

“Glory” in Romans 8 is connected to this same knot of themes. Believers share glory with Christ in the sense that we are “reinstated to glory on the basis of [our] position as children of God, sharing in the inheritance of the Son, who as the Messiah and new Adam is already crowned with glory and honor” (220).

Paul’s qualification is significant: We share in His glory if we suffer with Him. Jacob denies that we can map suffering/glory onto present/future. We’re glorified now, and share in Christ’s universal sovereignty now. Suffering isn’t “a preresurrection version of being glorified with Christ. . . . Rather, it is a present reality contemporaneous with present glory” (222).

Jacob sums up her understanding of Romans 8:29-30″: “Paul sees that those conformed to the image of the Son are those who,l though once participants in the Adamic submission to the powers of sin and death, now participate in the reign of the new Adam over creation. Mankind’s position on earth as God’s vicegerents to his creation is now restored, though now through the image of the Son of God, who reigns as God’s preeminent vicegerent” (226).

This reading requires, among other things, a fresh look at Romans 8:28. Jacob argues that it doesn’t mean that “everything works out for God’s people” (247). Elsewhere, sunergeo refers to the co-laboring of two parties or power; the datives can be read as instrumental datives. The RSV translation gets at the point: “we know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (quoted 247).

Within the argument of Romans 8:17-30, verse 28 is about the glorification that believers receive, their restoration to Adamic status over creation. Thus, “God’s children will receive this glory in full when their own redemption and adoption is complete, but they also are currently glorified, even if in part. . . . as God’s eschatological family, his children [are] used by God to bring redemption to the world around them, in part by action and in part by prayer” (250). Our glory is that God works with those who love Him to bring all things to good, the good of new creation.

Jacob’s thesis makes intuitive sense: Adam sinned and was enslaved; Jesus obeyed and was exalted; those who are in him are . . . what? The point must be to put humanity back on its Adamic track. The virtue of Jacob’s book is that she gives thick exegetical justification to this point and shows that the aim of Jesus’ death and resurrection is the glorification of humanity.

Bloomsbury in a Secular Age

Last updated on: July 2, 2018 at 5:12 pm By Peter Leithart

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed, Charles Taylor argues, the development of the “nova.” At that time, “the alternatives open to unbelief are multiplied and enriched.” After World War II, these options are diffused to the whole of Western societies, and this produces a “super-nova” (A Secular Age, 377).

These options arose out of the “cross pressure” that is inherent in Western culture after the Enlightenment. On the one hand, the notion of an impersonal, mathematical order to the world leads to an experience of flatness and emptiness; on the other hand, these very themes encourage people to explore ways of “thickening” their worlds.

Victorian culture, Taylor says, fuses national, religious, and moral concerns. It produces a moralist ethic, disciplined individuals. Those who feel this is restrictive attempt their own experiments in living.

Taylor observes, importantly, that these responses to the flattening of experience don’t necessarily take traditional religious forms. Art is a primary “thickener” that delivers moderns from the ugliness and calculation of capitalist society. As a result, art takes on a religious aura in modernity, a path to human flourishing, but a path that remains “secular,” wholly on the immanent plane.

The Bloomsbury group plays a role here. Taylor thinks Bloomsbury more radical and most groups or movements because it offers an alternative ethic that poses a “serious amendment to the reigning ethic” (404).

The ethic is derived from the work of G.E. Moore, the philosophical guru of the Bloomsberries. According to Moore, the only truly god things are personal relations and beautiful states of mind. In Taylor’s terms, “friendship and honest strong feelings are major goods.” Noel Annan summarized the ethic by city Virginia Woolf’s conviction that “you should detect exactly what you felt and should then, having realized what sort of person you were, live up to it” (quoted 405).

Everything else must be measured by how they promote or inhibit these intrinsic goods. That produces, in one sense, a “conservatism” that leaves much of the Victorian “ethic of decency, the structures of law and freedom, many of the disciplines, and much of the the institutional framework” in place. Keynes can be Bloomsbury to the core, a disciple of Moore, and yet spend his life in government (405).

Yet even while it preserved elements of the Victorian ethic, it undermined other aspects. Taylor says that “by not being radical, Bloomsbury was in a sense all the more subversive.” Even when the Bloomsberries lived like run-of-the-mill Victorians, it was on a different basis with a different aim: “the spirit which they advocated was poles apart from the ethic of disciple and manliness, which were very much taken as goods in themselves. Discipline yes, but only where it conduces to friendship and beautiful states of mind. In this way, they dismantled, by downgrading and rendering conditional, great parts of the reigning synthesis: its religion was utterly sidelined, it sexual ethic was declared bankrupt, its patriotism was severely chastened, most of its conventions were mocked” (405).

The subversion of the Victorian ethic was especially evidence in the Bloomsbury opposition to World War I. While other Victorians (say, Rupert Brooke) marched off with dreams of masculine glory, some Bloomsberries actively opposed the war (Lytton Strachey) while others simply checked out of the war fever. Great public events like the war were tested by Moore’s ethic, and found wanting.

Perhaps Bloomsbury’s most important legacy was its assault on alleged Victorian philistinism and chauvinism. When Virginia Woolf announced the “on or about December 19120 human nature changed,” she was referring to the post-Impressionist exhibition organized by Roger Fry. The exhibition targeted Bloomsbury’s two enemies simultaneously: It brought in avant garde art to combat philistinism, and it brought it in from France! (405).

Taylor fits Bloomsbury into two “vectors” of change during the period. The group “advanced on the vector of authenticity, prizing the individual self-expression of each person in their difference from others” and “radicalized the claims of ordinary human sensual desire against the supposedly ‘higher’ demands of discipline and abstinence” (406). They further immanentized goods – not merely to the “secular” realm but to the inner realm of human feeling. In these ways, “they helped set the climate of the latter half of the [twentieth] century, in England and elsewhere” (406).

The backstory is important. Virginia Woolf, and her sister Vanessa Bell, were daughters of the “godless Victorian,” Leslie Stephen. Their revolt was “a revolt within a revolt”: “The father rebels against Victorian faith, largely because it seems so much less humane than humanism, but keeps the ethic and discipline. The daughters then rebel against this, but don’t revise the original judgment of religion.” They go further in rejecting Christianity by defining humanness, in part, as sexual freedom (406).

Taylor finds Bloomsbury at times “irritatingly precious and reductive.” Strachey’s assault on eminent Victorians isn’t witty but “reductive and trivializing.” But Bloomsbury leaves the modern West, especially Britain, with a dilemma: On the one hand, the “larger realities” are used to justify mayhem on a horrific scale (World War I); on the other, deflating the larger realities brings us back to the flattened and empty experience that many were trying to escape. This is the dilemma: How can we restrain the dangers of “big ideas” without trivializing life?