Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

Theology - Liturgical: Eucharistic meditation

Matthew 15:27: She said, Yes, Lord; but even the dogs feed on the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.

We don’t belong at this table. I’m not referring here to the fact that we are all sinners who aren’t worthy to be considered our Lord’s table companions. That’s true, but I have something more specific in mind. We don’t belong here because we are not “children.” This is Israel’s table, and we are not Israelites.

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Theology - Liturgical: Baptismal meditation

Matthew 15:22: A Canaanite woman came out from that region, and began to cry out, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is cruelly demon-possessed.

What is baptism? What is it for? Why do we baptize infants? There are many answers to that, and throughout the history of the church, many of the answers have unnecessarily complicated the issue. In some traditions, the issue has been complicated by a complicated theology of grace. In other traditions, the issue has been complicated by the fear of undermining the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith.

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Bible - NT - Matthew: Worship service

In Matthew 15:29-31, Jesus moves back from the region of Tyre and Sidon to the sea of Galilee.  He goes on a mountain and sits down.  He has been on mountains a number of times already to do various things.  Most recently, he ascended to a mountain to pray as the Twelve went across the sea in their boat and had to be rescued from a storm.  But here Jesus goes to a mountain and sits, and the only other time He has done that is at the beginning of the sermon on the Mount.  Sitting is the posture of teaching, and Jesus sitting on the mountain is Moses, or Yahweh, delivering the law to Israel.

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Bible - OT - Proverbs: Proverbs 22:8-16

PROVERBS 22:8
Solomon uses agricultural imagery to describe realities of life.  Like Paul and Jesus, he says that we reap as we sow.  Our actions are always a kind of planting.  We are always sowing seed that will come to fruition later on.  If we sow righteousness, we will reap eternal life; if we sow iniquity, we reap “vanity,” that is to say, insubstantial nothing.

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Theology - Christology: Defending the incarnation?

The iconodules staked their argument on the incarnation, but Besancon notices that after the iconoclast controversy, figures in icons became less carnal rather than more: “In the few primitive icons, which come for the most part from Egypt . . . , Christ or the saints have stocky, thick-set, vigorous, extremely carnal physiques. . . . But, after the crises, the forms become more elongated, the faces more holly.  Even though the victory of orthodoxy in 843 was a victory of the incarnation, the icons - theoretically bearing witness to that victory - move toward the ethereal, the symbol, geometrism, hyperbolic asceticism.  It often seems that the style adopted by the artists expresses a compromise between the full vision of Christ’s humanity and the symbolic abstractions tolerated by iconoclasm.”

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Art: Reverse perspective

In his history of iconoclasm (The Forbidden Image), Alain Besancon describes some of the artistic features of Russian iconography: “Nature is stylized in such a way that trees, rocks, and houses defy gravity.  The buildings are not represented within a unified space: each floats in its own perspective.  The colors have a symbolic value.  Light casts no shadows. The perspective is generally reverse: the line of force extends from the icon toward the beholder’s eye.  Through the icon, the truths of faith radiate toward the person contemplating it.  The vanishing point thus moves toward him.”

Bible: Blogging Toward Sunday

Another lectionary meditation at The Christian Century: http://www.theolog.org/blog/2008/06/blogging-towa-4.html

Bible - NT - Matthew: Sermon notes

INTRODUCTION
Jesus again withdraws from Israel (cf. 14:13), and this time, following the trail of Elijah (1 Kings 17:9), goes into the notorious region of Tyre and Sidon (15:21).  There He heals a Canaanite woman’s daughter and feeds four thousand.

THE TEXT
“Then Jesus went out from there and departed to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a woman of Canaan came from that region and cried out to Him, saying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David! My daughter is severely demon-possessed.”  But He answered her not a word. . . .” (Matthew 15:21-39).

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Theology - Liturgical: Eucharistic meditation

Matthew 15:2: The Pharisees asked, Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders?  For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread?

Matthew 15 and the first part of chapter 16 return again and again to the subject of food.  The Pharisees ask Jesus about washing before a meal.  When Jesus responds to the Canaanite woman, He says that He cannot take the children’s bread and give it to the dogs.  He feeds four thousand, and when the disciples go to the other side of the sea, they forget to take bread.  All of these incidents have something to teach us about this table, this meal.

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Theology - Liturgical: Baptismal exhortation

1 Corinthians 6:9-11: Do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? . . . Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God.

The washing rites of the Old Covenant that Jesus talks about in the sermon text were effective.  A man who had a seminal emission had to wash himself and afterward he would be clean by the evening sacrifice.  A chair where a menstruating woman had sat became unclean, but anyone who sat in it had only to wash and he was cleansed and could return to the sanctuary of God.  Washings were effective; they effected a transition from one state to another, from uncleanness to cleanliness, from defilement to purity.

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History: Social objects

Fabian links the ocularcentrism and spatialization of Ramism with the social science tendency to regard its object of study as, well, objects: “Once the source of any knowledge worthy of that name is thought primarily to be visual perception of objects in space, why should it be scandalous to treat the Other - other societies, other cultures, other classes within the same society - comme des choses?”  He acknowledges that Durkheim, from whom the French phrase derives, didn’t want to treat persons as objects, but argues that “he did postulate in that context that the social and cultural must assume, through observation, quantification, and systematic generalization, the same facticity that is exhibited by the choses in our field of vision.”

Durkheim followed Enlightenment predecessors, who themselves derived their categories and instincts from ancient rhetorical sources, in formulating a “methodologie du regard.”

History: Grenzwissenschaft

Anthropology, Fabian says, is border control: “It patrols, so to speak, the frontiers of Western culture.  In fact, it has always been a Grenzwissenschaft, concerned with the boundaries: those of one race against another, those between one culture and another, and finally those between culture and nature.”

Fabian thinks that this “liminal” preoccupation makes it difficult for anthropology to settle “in any one of the accepted domains of knowledge” other than the catch-all of “social science.”

Two comments: First, if Milbank is right, anthropology is an extension of earlier forms of social theory, which patrol the boundaries within Western civilization; second, Fabian is offering something of an anthropological analysis of anthropology, one that clarifies its role as a kind of priestcraft, making distinctions “between holy and profane, and between clean and unclean.”

History: Medium limits message

After summing up Ong’s work on Ramus, Johannes Fabian (Time and the Other) suggests an analogy between Ramist pedagogy and anthropology: “Having learned more about the connections between printing and diagrammatic reduction of the contents of thought, one is tempted to consider the possibility that anthropological kinship theories (at least the ones that take off from data collected with River’s chart) are actually determined by the presentability of whatever knowledge they may contain in terms of diagrams that fit onto a conventional printed page.  In other words, it is the mode of storing reproducing, and disseminating knowledge in print (in articles, monographs, and textbooks) which . . . prejudge the What and How of large portions of enthnography.”

Anthropologists tend to forget that their diagrams showing ideas “in the heads of the natives” are in fact “unquestionably artifacts of visual-spatial conventions whose function it is to give ‘method’ to the dissemination of knowledge in our society.”

Bible - NT - Matthew: Handwashing

The Pharisaical practice of washing before meals is legally odd (as pointed out by Roger Booth, Jesus and the Laws of Purity).  The one explicit reference to the need for laymen to wash hands is Leviticus 15:11 doesn’t have to do with food or with victims of uncleanness.  Leviticus 15:11 says that an man who is unclean because of a genital discharge communicates that uncleanness to anyone he touches, unless he rinses his hands first; but the Pharisees are not washing hands because they are themselves unclean and they are not worried about communicating impurity to others.  Booth concludes that Leviticus 15:11 is an unlikely source of the Pharisaical practice found in the gospels.

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Bible - NT - Matthew: Inner purity?

Ernst Lohmeyer (Lord of the Temple) argues that Jesus’ saying on defilement in Mark 7 (=Matthew 15) “transfers the whole question of purity from the plant of material externals to that of man’s inner self. . . . there emerges in unmistakable superiority the inner world of the human heart which alone is able to make a man holy or unholy, clean or unclean.”  He goes on to admit that “‘what comes out of the mouth’ denotes everything that lodges in the heart and demands expression,” but he believes Jesus’ emphasis is on an inner purity.

This is not what Jesus says, however.  He talks about the source of impurity (outside v. inside) and the direction (outside-in, inside-out) but he doesn’t say that defilement is not simply an issue of the inner man.  What defiles, in fact, is not what is within but what originates within and flows out.  Intriguingly, Jesus sees even “evil thoughts” as realities that “come out” of the heart, and his list of defilements puts these on a par with external, material acts.  Perhaps in the light of Matthew 15:18, we should understand defiling evil thoughts as those that find expression in words.

But Jesus doesn’t indicate a possibility of an impurity that remains tightly enclosed within the heart, and he likely doesn’t envision a tightly enclosed purity of heart either.  Defilements are movements, flows, springs; thoughts and words and actions that comes from the heart but don’t remain there.

Bible - NT - Matthew: Chiasm of bread

Matthew 14:22-16:12 is arranged in a chiastic pattern, repeatedly focusing on food but centering on Jesus’ healing ministry:

A. Crossing the sea, 14:22-36

B. Pharisees and scribes question Jesus about washing before meals,  15:1-20

C. Jesus gives crumbs to the Canaanite woman, 15:21-29

D. Jesus heals the multitudes, 15:29-31

C’. Jesus feeds 4000, 15:32-39

B’. Pharisees and Sadducees test Jesus, 16:1-4

A’. Disciples forget bread while crossing the sea, 16:5-12

History: Starry sky above

On clear nights, I can see the Milky Way stretching across the sky from my drive way.   Since the mid-nineteenth century, fewer and fewer have easy sight of the night sky.  In Hong Kong, the buildings stretch and loom so high that the streets below are a cavernous indoor mall, a throbbing dystopian under-city.

Hans Blumenberg wonders what this does to the imagination: Night-lighted cities constitute “a secession from one of the most human possibilities: that of disinterested curiosity and pleasure in looking, for which the starry heavens have offered an unsurpassable remoteness that was an everyday reality.”

History: From court to promenade

Jay notes that the mid-19th century witnessed shift in the setting of “oracularcentric spectacle” from the “aristocratic court” to the “bourgeois equivalent in the massive sheet glass windows [of department stories] displaying a wealth of commodities to be coveted, and, if money allowed, consumed.  Here the dandies’ quest to distinguish themselves by nuances of fashion, visual signifiers of taste and style, became a tantalizing possibilities for the masses. . . . Here the accelerated panoramic view of the railway journey was replicated as the consumer faced a bewildering plethora of possible commodities to buy.”

Art: Impressionism and Urban Renewal

In 1859, Baron George-Eugene Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine, began overhauling Paris.  The ultimate result was a masterpiece of urban rationality - straight streets, buildings of the same height, squares, a mappable city.

On the way to clarity, though, the city was “rendered illegible,” according to art historian T. J. Clark.  He adds that Paris was depicted in the media as “parade, phantasmagoria, dream, dumbshow, mirage, masquerade.  Traditional ironies at the expense of the metropolis mingled with new metaphors of specifically visual untruth.  They were intended to stress the sheer ostentation and flimsiness of the new streets and apartment blocks, and beyond that to indicate the more and more intrusive machinery of illusion built into the city and determining its use.”

Margin Jay suggests that this urban reconstruction “was soon registered in the Impressionist demolition of three-dimensional space.”

Philosophy: Horizontal platonism

Knight says that modernity has not left the upper/lower, intelligible/sensible dualism of Platonism behind, but only tipped it on its side.  The modern “subject” is a variation on the world of ideas, while the inert “object” corresponds to the lesser reality of the sensible world.

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