What Is Disenchantment?

Last updated on: May 3, 2018 at 9:52 pm By Peter Leithart

Jason Josephson-Storm tells us what Weber’s disenchantment is not: It doesn’t mean that magic is eliminated. Protestants “were against magic and superstitious rituals” but they never doubted the reality of magic or the crowdedness of the universe (Myth of Disenchantment, 280).

Disenchantment also “is not a new pessimistic mood, nor is it the fragmentation of social cohesion. It is not the rise of instrumental reason, because magic itself is instrumental. It is not yet secularization insofar as disenchantment happens earlier and is first and foremost internal to religion. It is not the evolution of magic into religion, and religion in turn, into science . . . because Weber repeatedly reminds his readers that magic and religion often coincide” (280-1).

What is it then? It’s first “the repudiation of ‘the magical means to salvation'” – that is, the repudiation of sacramental grace.

More systematically and fully, Josephson-Storm summarizes disenchantment under four headings (286):

“1. Metaphysical realism (the belief that the world is and does not represent)

2. Ontological homogeneity (the belief that there are not truly extramundane objects or people)

3. Ethical predeterminism (that God has already decided each individual’s soteriological fate) or value nihilism (the excision of value from the world of fact)

4. Epistemic overconfidence (the belief that everything can be known by means of intellectualization/theoretical rationality)”

It’s an intriguing sketch. #1 seems basic: The world doesn’t carry inherent meaning; it just is, and all meaning is projected onto it. That implies already the secular version of #3, that fact and value have to be strictly distinguished.

The link of predestination with value nihilism is worth a moment’s reflection. The argument seems to be that there’s an analogy between saying a) God has predetermined the saved, irrespective of works and b) the facts of the world – say, the conduct of my life – has no ultimate value. If we say, as Protestants usually do, that God works out His purposes through secondary means, and that we are judged according to works, the analogy breaks down. That is, there is only an analogy if sola gratia is taken as an antinomian declaration, only if it means “you’ll be saved irrespective of the way you live.”

Josephson-Storm, finally, emphasizes that Entzauberung is better translated as “disenchanting” rather than “disenchantment.” It’s a “process” and a “program,” not “an accomplished state of affairs” (300). Remembering that dynamic will remind us that Weberian disenchantment doesn’t imply the absence of magic, but its continuing presence: “For there to be an active, ongoing disenchanting of the world, magic has to be intact – somewhere, among some groups” (300).

Greek Temple Architecture

Last updated on: May 4, 2018 at 3:45 am By Peter Leithart

Mary Emerson’s Greek Sanctuaries and Temple Architecture is a concise, informative introduction to her topic. After introductory chapters explaining the meaning, uses, architecture and artistic adornments of sanctuaries in the Greek world, Emerson devotes a chapter to the major cultic sites of Greece – Delphi, Athens, the sanctuary of Apollo at Bassae, the temple of Olympian Zeus on Sicily.

The book is richly illustrated with diagrams and black-and-white photos, some of which show the stunning settings of these Greek temples. Emerson’s bibliography makes it clear that she is conversant with recent literature, but nearly every quotation in the text comes from an ancient source. The book is blessedly free of academic trendiness.

Emerson focuses on the details of each particular temple, but at the outset she sets some of the parameters of the discussion.

If you’ve seen one Greek temple, you’ve seen them all: So some might say. Emerson disagrees. Of course, “it is quite normal for building design to contain not only innovation, but also deliberate conformity to a type.” But she argues that “to the interested eye, each temple is unique. Even Doric temples, though said to conform to strict rules, all differ. As in any field of interest, what seems uniform to outsiders is – on inspection – full of nuance, innovation and individuality” (3).

Greek sanctuaries weren’t used only by those who “made a particular choice to be religious.” The shrine of a city “belonged to the citizen body as a whole,” and civic feasts were part of a citizen’s life (5). Though sanctuaries were manned by priests, everyone participated in the festivities, which were varied – “sacred song and dance, special costumes, sacrifices, competitions and feastings” (10).

Abstraction and Image

Last updated on: May 3, 2018 at 7:29 pm By Peter Leithart

In his recently published Lewis on the Christian Life, Joe Rigney devotes a few pages to expounding Lewis’s understanding of the relation between abstract theological statements and the images of Scripture. He endorses the abstractions as a caution against false inferences that might be drawn from the images, but he warns that the abstractions aren’t to be taken as “literal” truth or as data of revelation.

Thus, for instance, Rigney presents two theological statements:

“A. When God is angry, smoke goes up from his nostrils (Ps. 18:8).

B. God is absolute Being and all human characteristics are inapplicable to him” (55).

Lewis doesn’t think that B is literal and A a “poetical decoration or . . . a concession to the ‘primitive mind of the ancient Jews.” Rather, neither can be taken literally. And A at least has the advantage of being revealed:

“B can make no claim to be a revelation: we have made it. A does make this claim. . . . To prefer B is to think that the symbol we have made is better than the symbol He has made. I think we are right to use B as a corrective whenever A, taken literally, threatens to become absurd: but we must instantly plunge back into A. Only God Himself knows in what sense He is ‘like’ a father or king, capable of love and anger. But since He has given us that picture of Himself we may be sure that it is more importantly ‘like’ than any other concept we might try to substitute for it” (quoted 56, fn 16).

Lewis recognizes that “Scripture doesn’t take the slightest pains to guard the doctrine of Divine Impassibility. We are constantly presented as exciting the Divine wrath or pit – even as ‘grieving’ God. I know this language is analogical. But when we say that, we must not smuggle in the idea that we can throw the analogy away and, as it were, get behind it to a purely literal truth. All we can really substitute for the analogical expression is some theological abstraction. And the abstraction’s value is almost entirely negative. It warns us against drawing absurd consequences from the analogical expression by prosaic extrapolations. By itself, the abstraction ‘impassible’ can get us nowhere. It might even suggest something far more misleading than the most naif Old Testament picture of a stormily emotional Jehovah. Either something inert, or something which was ‘Pure Act’ in such a sense that it could take no account of events within the universe it had created” (quoted 56-7).

Rigney cites Lewis’s two rules for interpreting images: “1) Never take the images literally. 2) When the purport of the images – what they say to our fear and hope and will and affections – seems to conflict with the theological abstractions, trust the purport of the images every time. For our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modeling of spiritual reality in legal or chemical or mechanical terms. Are these likely to be more adequate than the sensuous, organic, and personal images of Scripture – light and darkness, river and well, seed and harvest, master and servant, hen and chickens, father and child? The footprints of the Divine are more visible in that rich soil than across rocks or slag-heaps. Hence what they now call ‘demythologizing’ Christianity can easily be ‘re-mythologizing’ it – and substituting a poorer mythology for a richer” (quoted 58; emphasis added).

If there is one motto I’d like to convince theologians to adopt, it’s this: “Trust the purport of the images every time.”

Law of Liberty

Last updated on: April 29, 2018 at 5:39 pm By Peter Leithart

Many complain today about the negativity of the Ten Words. Sure, there are a few positive commandments – remember the Sabbath day, honor your Father and mother.

Mostly, though, it’s a list of “Don’ts.” Don’t have other gods, don’t serve images, don’t bear My name lightly, don’t kill, steal, commit adultery, bear false witness, covet. Don’t, don’t, don’t. It inhibits my freedom. God says He brought Israel from slavery, but it seems He just substituted a different form of slavery, slavery to God.

In God’s view, the opposite is the case. These words don’t inhibit freedom. They are the “perfect law of liberty” (James).

They are given to a redeemed people. The Ten Words aren’t given so that Israel can earn his own manumission. The Ten Words are given to a freed slave to teach them how to live in freedom as God’s son.

In Egypt, their bodies belonged to Pharaoh, their time belonged to Pharaoh. We learn at the end of Joshua that Egypt had even won Israel’s religious devotion, his heart. In Egypt, Israel had begun to worship the gods of Egypt.

When Yahweh delivers them from this slavery, He doesn’t deliver them to absolute free agency. Absolute free agency is impossible. In the world God made, the world that actually exists, everyone serves a lord, everyone is a servant to one master or another. The question is not whether we serve but whom we serve. Yahweh has delivered them from the house of slavery (‘ebedim) in order to make Israel the servant (‘ebed) of His house, the son who will serve until he is given authority in the house.

A nation characterized by disrespect for parents, workaholism, violence, envy, theft, lies isn’t free. That is a form of slavery. God’s Word liberates us. God’s law is good. Keeping it is for our good. God speaks to His son Israel to teach him to be free.

The First Word is the foundation of the life of freedom that Yahweh’s son Israel is called to. The most fundamental liberation is liberation from false gods.

Literally, the First Word says, in seven Hebrew words, “There shall not be for you another god before My face.” That has a specific force. “Before Yahweh’s face” means “in His presence,” and specifically “in His presence in the sanctuary.” It’s doesn’t refer to ranking (no God higher than Me) but to position (no God in my presence). The most literal violation of this commandment would be the action of Manasseh, who places another god right in the temple, before the face of Yahweh.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that Israel is free to have other gods outside the sanctuary. Yahweh tells Ezekiel (Ezekiel 14) that the elders of Israel who come to consult him have set up their idols in their hearts. They have made their hearts into shrines for idols. Whenever they come before the face of Yahweh, they bring their idols with them. They set up other gods before the face of Yahweh.

And this is reinforced in the new covenant. We see the face of God in the face of Jesus, and Jesus dwells in our hearts by His Spirit. If we set up idols in our hearts, we are violating the First Word, we are placing idols right before the face of God, just as truly as Manasseh placed another god before Yahweh’s face in the temple.

None of us has a shrine to Baal or Buddha in our basement. Few of us have probably seen actual idolatry in practice. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that we’re free of idols, that we don’t need the liberating First Word, “Thou shalt have no other gods before My face.”

The Lord is our Judge, our Savior, our law-giver. He’s the one who blesses and curses, the bearer of our sins, the one we trust, the one who speaks with authority. (The following is indebted to David Powlison.) When we substitute other judges and saviors, when we look to others to bear our sins, when we trust, fear, or love any other before God, we are idolaters. Idols take our hearts and control us.

Are you worried about public opinion? Are you paralyzed by fear about how your father or mother will assess you? Are you pursuing fame? Is that the ultimate aim of your life? Are you afraid of disapproval? You’ve set up an idol, a judge – public opinion, a perfectionist father, a hyper-critical mother – in place of God the Judge. Shatter that idol.

Do you think these thoughts: “If only we had a bit more money, our lives would be happy and fulfilled. If only I could get a better job, or keep a flawlessly decorated home, then my life would be good.” You’ve set up an idol, a savior – money, success, luxuries – that you think will make your life truly and fully blessed.

When you’re cornered, do you lash out and blame others? Do you have so much trouble admitting you’re wrong that you have to scapegoat your wife or husband, your parents or children? You’ve set up an idol, a scapegoat who will bear your sin. Or, do you flagellate and pound yourself for your failures and perceived failures. You’ve set up another idol, made yourself your own sin-bearer, rather than trusting that Jesus has born your sins.

Whose voice is running in your head? What imperatives do you obey? Does the voice in your head come from advertisements, popular songs, YouTube or Netflix shows? We all have lords and masters. There is no such thing as free agency. Who is your true Lord – not your professed Lord, but the one who actually speaks with authority into your life? Who is speaking to you from what holy mountain? If the voice in your head says “Do this,” but the voice from Sinai says “Don’t” – which do you listen to? As soon as, and as much as, you silence the Lord’s voice, you’ve set up an idol, another Lord, in your heart.

Idols like company. Idolatry is inherently polytheistic. Idols feed off one another, pile on one another, shift and move to keep hold of your heart. Your idols may feed off the idols of others. As David Powlison says, co-dependency is more accurately – more biblically – characterized as co-idolatry.

A husband has a drinking problem. At root, Powlison says, it’s an idol problem, and the sanctuary of his heart is teeming with false gods. He loves pleasure more than God; he seeks temporary peace and salvation in an escape into the bottle; his bar mates become his judges, and he lives to gain their approval.

At times, he pulls another god out of the closet: He rages at his wife’s complaints, judging her as if he were God or piling up his own sins on her, as if she were the Suffering Servant. Sometimes, he puts himself on the cross in a fit of remorse. But soon other gods take over and he’s back at the bar.

Meanwhile, his wife’s heart is also infested with idols. She acts out a martyr script, since she’s the only one who can save the family and keep everything together; she judges her husband; she finds comfort in the approval of friends; she stays with her no-good husband because she’s afraid of living without a man’s companionship.

Serving one God must have seemed dangerously restrictive to Israel. After all, there are other gods, other powers and forces in the world. What happens if we neglect one of them? Will he or she become angry? If we neglect the god of fertility, we might be barren. If we neglect some god, we might be missing out.

It sounds foolish, but we are as cast about by our idols as any ancient polytheist. For us there is one God, and one Lord Jesus Christ. And when our worship is directed at that one God, our hearts are single, our desires are focused, our lives take on a coherence they can’t get otherwise. Idols tear us apart, with their contradictory, ever-shifting demands. The only path of freedom is having a coherent life, and the only way to live with coherence and integrity is to keep the First Word, to worship Yahweh alone, not to have other idols before His face.

Your life can’t be coherent without worship of the one God who is Judge, Savior, Law-giving, Sin-Bearer. And the life of a society can’t be coherent if everyone is independently pursuing his own gods.

“Thou shalt have no other gods before Me” is a declaration of independence, a charter for a life and society free of the infinite gods who compete for our love, loyalty, hope, trust, the gods who seduce you to pursue vanities.

Father-Son at Sinai

Last updated on: April 29, 2018 at 5:43 pm By Peter Leithart

Israel has been in the wilderness for three months when they arrive at Sinai (Exodus 19:1). Behind them are the ruins of Egypt, devastated by plagues. They have passed through the sea, received manna and water in the wilderness. They have grumbled and rebelled. And now they come to the mount of God. The God who unveiled His name to Moses on this mountain is about to unveil Himself to Israel.

It’s the third month, and the third day of the month (19:16). Yahweh descends in a thick cloud onto the mountain with the sound of a trumpet blast that summons Israel to assembly. The Lord speaks from the cloud with a voice like thunder: “I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”

He speaks what the Bible calls the “Ten Words” (Exodus 34:28; Deuteronomy 4:13).

He has spoken ten times before. Ten times Genesis 1 says “And Elohim spoke.” Now from Sinai, “Elohim” the Creator again speaks ten words.

He has spoken on the third day before: On the original third day, in His seventh of ten creation words, Yahweh called on the land (eretz) to bring forth (yatza’) grass yielding seed and trees yielding fruit (Genesis 1:11). (On the sixth day, Elohim also brings [yatza’] animals from the land [eretz], Genesis 1:24.)

As Yahweh begins speaking from Sinai, He reminds Israel that he brought them (yatza’) from the land (eretz) of Egypt. During the third month, Israel will later celebrate Pentecost, the Feast of weeks, a celebration of the firstfruits of the harvest. Here at the first Pentecost, Israel is the firstfruits, the people of grain and grapes, of bread and wine, the first to rise from the land on the third day.

Elohim speaks Israel to become a new creation, His treasured possession, a royal priesthood among the nations. He cuts covenant to bring Israel into a unique relationship with Himself, and to teaches them how to live justly with one another. God speaks so that this vine brought from Egypt (Psalm 80; Isaiah 5) will produce fruit.

To whom is Yahweh speaking? When Israel arrives at Sinai Yahweh speaks directly to Moses. He calls Moses (19:3, 20) and speaks to Moses (19:9, 10, 21, 24). Six times he addresses Moses and Moses relays His messages to Israel. After the Ten Words, Moses again goes up into the cloud to receive the Lord’s word and relay it to the people (20:21-22).

But the Ten Words are different. Moses is at the foot of Sinai with the people (19:25) when God speaks (20:1). On the third day of the third month, God speaks a seventh time, and addresses not the mediator Moses but all Israel (cf. 20:18; His eighth speech, to Moses, includes the “case laws,” 20:22—23:33). Among all the words that Yahweh speaks at Sinai, the Ten Words are alone unmediated, spoken to people who have been brought from the land.

But there’s a grammatical difficulty. God speaks to all the people, but the commandments are in the masculine singular of the second person. The KJV gets it right: “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me”; “Thou shalt not kill”; “Thou shalt not steal.” It’s as if God were saying, “You man, I brought you out of slavery. You man, don’t have any other gods, or images. You man, don’t kill, steal, commit adultery, or covet.”

It’s possible that God speaks this way to emphasize that every individual Israelite has to keep these laws. These aren’t simply collective rules for the nation but apply to individual conduct.

It’s also possible that God is addressing these words to Israelite men in particular. They’re the ones who labor and rule a house so they can give rest. They are the ones who are forbidden to desire their neighbor’s wife. Commands are given to the elders of Israel, who are the ones who mediate God’s Words to the rest of the people.

I think something else is going on. Who has been delivered from Egypt? Who has been rescued from the house of bondage? Israel, of course, but Israel as the son of Yahweh (Exodus 4:23). This is the legal basis for Yahweh’s demand to Pharaoh: Israel is My son; you’ve enslaved My son, but you have no right to My son; let My son go. When Pharaoh refuses, Yahweh takes up the role of a kinsman redeemer and forces the issue. With a mighty hand and outstretched arm, He brings His son from Egypt.

God’s first command was given to His son, Adam. Now He speaks to His new-Adamic son, Israel.

Sinai is a Father-son talk, like the wisdom of the Proverbs. As such, it’s a self-revealing talk. Yahweh the Father of Israel discloses His likes and dislikes to His son. The Ten Words tell Israel how to live, but they are just as much “a personal declaration by YHWH” (Edward Greenstein).

The Ten Words are house rules of Yahweh. They teach Israel how to resemble his Father. Every Israelite is to renounce idolatry, keep Sabbath, honor parents, reject murder, sexual immorality, theft, and evil desires.

Israel the son, Israel as a corporate son of the divine Father, is to take on His divine character. Corporately, Israel is to be a people without idols, a rest-giving people, a people respectful of ancestors, not a people characterized by violence, theft, sexual sin, lies.

Yahweh speaks to Israel his son not as God-in-general, not as the Creator of the universe. He identifies Himself to His son Israel as “Yahweh,” who is “thy God.”

The name Yahweh is mysterious. When Yahweh reveals His name to Moses from the burning bush (Exodus 3), He first calls Himself “I am who I am.” That translation too simple. The Hebrew verbs could be any tense: “I will be who I will be; I am who I will be; I will be who I was” (Victor Hamilton).

The context clarifies. Yahweh is the God who sees Israel’s affliction and hears his cry. He’s the God who comes down to deliver and to bring them out of the house of slavery. Yahweh is the God who will be everything that Israel needs, who will do everything that Israel needs done. He will always be for Israel.

To say that God is Yahweh is to say that He is Israel’s God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who makes and keeps promises to specific people, to a specific people. To say that God is Yahweh is to say that He is “thy God,” God to Israel his son.

Coherence in Social Science

Last updated on: April 28, 2018 at 7:06 pm By Peter Leithart

David Powlison investigates how the social sciences, especially psychology, can coherently hold together the moral demand for personal responsibility, the fact of social conditioning, and the experience that we are victims of forces beyond our control.

As he puts the question: I am responsible for my sins: ‘Johnny is a bad boy.’ My will is in bondage: ‘Johnny can’t help it.’ I am deceived and led about by others: ‘Johnny got in with a bad crowd.’ How can these be simultaneously true?”

The answer, he claims, is theological: “Human motivation is always ‘with respect to God.’ The social and behavioral sciences miss this ‘intentionality,’ because they themselves are idolatrously motivated. In a massive irony, they build into their charter and methodology a blindness to the essential nature of their subject matter. . . . Motivation is always God-relational. Thus human motivation is not essentially the sort of unitary species-wide phenomenon that the human sciences pursue. It is encountered and observed in actual life as an intrinsically binary phenomenon: faith or idolatry.”

In short, the social sciences can hold these dimensions together only with a radically revised anthropology, an anthropology of homo adorans: “human beings are worshiping creatures, willy-nilly.”

This forces a revision of the diagnosis of various psychological disorders. Food disorders aren’t simply a matter of being “hunger driven.” Rather, the issue is “I am ‘hunger-driven-rather–than-God-driven.'” God intends for us “to relate to food by thankfully eating what we know we have received and by sharing generously. I am an active idolater when normal hunger pangs are the wellspring of problem behavior and attitudes.”

But idolatry is flexible enough not only to cover inner motivations, but social formation. Idolatry is a public reality, shared among people. Thus, for instance: “The idolatries inhabiting our relations with food, however, are as social as they are biological or psychological. Perhaps my father modeled identical attitudes. Perhaps my mother used food to get love and to quell anxiety. Perhaps they went through the Great Depression and experienced severe privation, which has left its mark on them and made food a particular object of anxiety.”

Some Christian psychologists miss the central issue of idolatry. When secular psychology is “baptized” into Christian counseling, the stark issue of idolatry and faith is obscured. The “rather than God” at the root of human motivation is ignored.

And this distorts the whole psychological theory. Some theories posit a set of basic needs. Idols may still figure into the picture, but they are secondary: “our idols are wrong ways to meet legitimate needs. Repentance from idolatry is thus also secondary, being instrumental to the satisfaction of needs.” Whatever the intensions, this ends up instrumentalizing the gospel: “the logic of love-need systems is analogous to the ‘health and wealth’ false gospels. Jesus gives you what you deeply yearn for without challenging those yearnings.”

Developed within the developed world, need theories are typically applicable only to that world: “Such theories lack appeal and effectiveness ‘cross-culturally’ to people and places where the reigning idols are not intimacy idols but, for example, power, status, sensual pleasure, success, or money.”

Powlison argues that for the Bible idolatry is the issue, “the primary motivational factor. We fail to love people because we are idolaters who love neither God nor neighbor. We become objectively insecure because we abide under God’s curse and because other people are just as self-centered as we are. We create and experience estrangement from both God and other people. The love of God teaches us to repent of our ‘need for love,’ seeing it as a lust, receiving merciful real love, and beginning to learn how to love rather than being consumed with getting love.”

In short, “there is no such thing as that neutral, normal and a priori love need at the root of human motivation.” There is either love for God or for some idol. Love and need is always intentional, directed at some object.

The category of idolatry also helps us avoid the reductionism of psychological typology: “He is a type-A person. He is a Pleaser. He is a Controller. He is a combination of melancholic and choleric temperaments.”

This isn’t much help since “they are not explanations for anything but are simply ways of describing common clusters of symptoms.” Further, people aren’t so simple because their loves and objects of worship aren’t so straightforward. Idols come in clusters, and they shift over time; we devote ourselves to Idol A for awhile, and then find Idol B more attractive.

We can’t even really say “His root idol is X”: “the data on idolatry does not generally support such reductionistic understandings of the human heart. At best we can make the softer claim, ‘His most characteristic idol is . . . usually . . . but at other times . . . !’ For purely heuristic purposes it may be useful to notice that one person is particularly attuned to the intimacy idols, another to avoidance idols, another to power idols, another to comfort idols, another to pleasure idols, another to religiosity idols, and so forth.”

In the end, we have to acknowledge the wisdom of Calvin: Our hearts are factories of idols, making use of what material the world hands us. We are all polytheists, rent in pieces by the demands of our many lords.

Which is why “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me” is a charter of liberty.

Exodus and Idolatry

Last updated on: April 28, 2018 at 12:53 am By Peter Leithart

Edward L. Greenstein’s contribution to The Decalogue in Jewish and Christian Tradition examines the rhetoric of the Ten Words. He raises the question of the order of the first two commandments. Traditions differ.

“In the later Jewish tradition, ‘I am YHWH your God’ is the first commandment, and ‘You are not to have any other gods’ and ‘You are not to make yourself a carved image’ are both part of the second. In the Samaritan, some early Jewish traditions, and Christian traditions, ‘I am YHWH your God’ is preliminary, and the first and second commandments are, respectively, ‘You are not to have any other gods’ and ‘You are not to make yourself a carved image.’ Many modern scholars, influenced by the comparison of biblical law to the structure of ancient Near Eastern vassal treaties, also tend to regard ‘I am YHWH your God’ as an introductory formula, neither a commandment in and of itself, nor an integral part of the commandment ‘You are not to have any other gods'” (8).

Rhetorically, none of these explains the form of the text. Greenstein points to “a formulaic parallel between the two prohibitions, ‘You are not to have any other gods’ and ‘You are not to make yourself a carved image.’ The second of these is followed by a motive clause: ‘for I, YHWH your God, am a jealous God.’ The reason not to make images of any other gods for purposes of worship is that YHWH, Israel’s god, is jealous and will not tolerate any rivals for Israel’s adoration” (8-9).

He points out that “the motive clause begins almost identically to the first line of the Ten Commandments: ‘I am YHWH your God.’ In line with this observation, the first line of the divine discourse should be regarded as the motive clause of the first commandment. That is, Israel must have no other god than YHWH because it was YHWH who liberated the Israelites from Egyptian servitude, and no other god” (9).

In short, motive clauses and prohibitions are arranged in a chiasm:

“A (motive) I am YHWH your God

B (prohibition) You are not to have any other gods

B’ (prohibition) You are not to make yourself a carved-image

A’ (motive) For I YHWH your God” (9).

Greenstein notes that there are parallels elsewhere in the Old Testament: “In Judg 6:8–10, YHWH is reported to say: I brought you out of Egypt, I am YHWH your God; thus you must not worship the gods of the Amorites (i.e. the Canaanites). And in Ps 81:10–11, the injunction ‘You shall have no foreign god’ is followed by the declaration: ‘I YHWH am your God who brought you out of the Land of Egypt’” (9).

Strictly, then, the first word begins with the prohibition “Thou shalt have no other gods before My face,” but the Ten Words actually begin with a motive clause, “I am Yahweh . . . who brought you from the land of Egypt, from the house of slavery.”

Fruitful Eunuchs

Last updated on: April 30, 2018 at 7:27 pm By Peter Leithart

In Acts 8, Luke offers the first glimpse of the international scope of the gospel. Its setting in Acts is significant. Everything in Luke’s Gospel moves toward Jerusalem. The “infancy” narratives conclude with twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, listening and teaching (Luke 2:41-51). Between Luke 9 and 19, Jesus marches relentlessly toward Jerusalem, from the mount of transfiguration to the Mount of Olives where He will be crucified. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus return to Jerusalem once they recognize Jesus (Luke 24:13-35), and at the end of the Gospel Jesus sends His disciples back to Jerusalem. Luke ends his Gospel where he began, in the temple (Luke 24:50-53).

Jesus’ disciples don’t leave until Stephen (“Crown”) becomes the first Christian martyr. Then they flee, dispersed like seed, spreading the good news of the risen Jesus. Stephen’s blood is the seed of the church’s mission. The deacon Phillip ends up in Samaria, performing miracles of healing and winning converts.

As Jesus said (Acts 1:8), the apostolic witness doesn’t stop in Samaria. When Peter and John later lay their hands on Samaritans, the Spirit falls on them. A Samaritan Pentecost follows on the original Pentecost in Jerusalem, incorporating Samaritans into the original company of Jewish disciples. Immediately, the Spirit of Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria sends Phillip away to the desert, where he encounters a high-ranking member of the Ethiopian court.

In Hebrew, Ethiopians are Cushites, descendants of the firstborn of Ham (Genesis 10:6-7), whose very name evokes a sense of exotic threat erupting from the southern netherworlds (2 Chronicles 12:3; 14:9-15). This Ethiopian is a Gentile God-fearer. He has been to Jerusalem for worship, but, as Warren Gage and John Beck point out, he could not have found the experience satisfying. Eunuchs were not admitted to the congregation of Israel (Deuteronomy 23:1).

Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, the eunuch is leaving Jerusalem, but Luke is setting up a contrast of old and new. The eunuch will not return to the temple. Ever since Stephen’s blood has been mingled with the blood of Jesus, the Way leads in new directions.

When Phillip meets him, the eunuch is in a desert place, a setting that mimics the barrenness of his own body. Yet his reading gives him hope. Though the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 is cut off from the land of the living (Isaiah 53:8), he will see his offspring (Isaiah 53:10). The Suffering Servant is a kind of eunuch, but a fruitful one, as his suffering issues in fruitfulness for Zion, the barren woman who becomes a joyful mother of children (Isaiah 54:1).

Further on, Isaiah makes explicit reference to eunuchs: “Let no eunuch complain, ‘I am only a dry tree’” (56:3). Rather, the eunuch who keeps Sabbath will have an enduring name better than sons and daughters (56:5). No wonder the eunuch is eager to know this man.

Phillip has learned his hermeneutics from Jesus: Beginning with Isaiah 53 (Acts 8:35; cf. Luke 24:27), he proclaims the gospel of Jesus from all the Scriptures. As they travel, the eunuch sees water. Confessing Jesus, he is baptized, watered to become a fruitful tree, a tree of life. Excluded from the temple, he becomes an “Israelite” by receiving water in the wilderness.

As Jesus said about another text of Isaiah, so Phillip could say: This day Isaiah 56 is fulfilled in our sight. The new is better than the old: It turns dry land into pools of water; it is the covenant of the fruitful eunuch.

Continue reading at politicaltheology.com.

Sacramentum and Typos

Last updated on: April 27, 2018 at 4:13 pm By Peter Leithart

Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) argues that the “Catholic concept” of sacrament arises from an understanding of the Bible, especially of the relation of the Old and New (Theology of the Liturgy, 177-8).

He writes, “the Catholic concept of sacramentum is based on the ‘typological’ interpretation of Scripture – an interpretation in terms of parallels to Christ. This concept loses its mainstay when this interpretation is completely lost.”

The connection is there, even if “Catholic” doesn’t mean “Roman Catholic.” A Christian understanding of sacraments depends on rightly relating old and new.

As it has in modern interpretation of the Bible. When typology is lost, then “the way in which the New Testament itself understands Scripture is abandoned also; for all that the New Testament says is by no means intended to produce a new Scripture; rather, it means to give directions on how to understand the Christic content of the Old Testament. Whoever thinks that this way of dealing with the Bible is not allowed may perhaps gain a literal understanding of the Old Testament, but he thereby radically rejects the New Testament and its understanding of the Old.”

Just to make that clear: Rejecting New Testament hermeneutics is a “radical” rejection of the New Testament itself, because one of the central concerns of the New Testament is to teach us to read the Old.

Mummified Concepts

Last updated on: April 26, 2018 at 8:56 pm By Peter Leithart

From Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, on “reason” in philosophy:

“You ask me what all idiosyncrasy is in philosophers? . . . For instance their lack of the historical sense, their hatred even of the idea of Becoming, their Egyptianism. They imagine that they do honour to a thing by divorcing it from history sub specie æterni,—when they make a mummy of it. All the ideas that philosophers have treated for thousands of years, have been mummied concepts; nothing real has ever come out of their hands alive. These idolaters of concepts merely kill and stuff things when they worship,—they threaten the life of everything they adore. Death, change, age, as well as procreation and growth, are in their opinion objections,—even refutations. That which is cannot evolve; that which evolves is not. Now all of them believe, and even with desperation, in Being. But, as they cannot lay hold of it, they try to discover reasons why this privilege is withheld from them. ‘Some merely apparent quality, some deception must be the cause of our not being able to ascertain the nature of Being: where is the deceiver?’ ‘We have him,’ they cry rejoicing, ‘it is sensuality!’ These senses, which in other things are so immoral, cheat us concerning the true world. Moral: we must get rid of the deception of the senses, of Becoming, of history, of falsehood.—History is nothing more than the belief in the senses, the belief in falsehood. Moral: we must say ‘no’ to everything in which the senses believe to all the rest of mankind: all that belongs to the ‘people.’ Let us be philosophers, mummies, monotono-theists, grave-diggers!—And above all, away with the body, this wretched idée fixe of the senses, infected with all the faults of logic that exist, refuted, even impossible, although it be impudent enough to pose as if it were real!”