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Archive for the ‘textures’ Category

unseen evil: Revelation 16

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 25, 2009| Leave a Comment »

This morning’s newspaper chronicles, in a manner of speaking, the movements of kings, princes, and their armies. Such human jockeying for power and the ‘outcry in the streets’, the end of which the psalmist longs to see, sound a constant beat in the rhythm of human affairs.

Yet there is, in the newsprint of a dying print medium, no similar register of dark, demonic forces. One is left to understand that powerful men and women make the world, plowing deep, bloody furrows by their unrelenting ambition. (more…)

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Jerusalem descending: Revelation 3

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 12, 2009| Leave a Comment »

From time to time the course of events hands to us a particularly pleasant fruit encased in a most bitter shell.

The genre of biblical literature—it is of course to be found outside the biblical text as well—that is called ‘apocalyptic’ addresses itself to the faithful who have lost control. Words like ‘power’, ‘influence’, and ‘clout’ have meaning in a society and an historical moment in which the pious can share in the shaping of their space, their time, their shared destiny. Often this privilege is denied. Then, apocalyptic speaks its word. (more…)

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inheritance of dominion: Revelation 2

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 11, 2009| Leave a Comment »

The letters to the churches that occupy the early chapters of the book of Revelation are a study in nuanced assessment. The Lord Jesus, who speaks in these letters embedded in an apocalyptic neighborhood, metes out both praise and rebuke in roughly equal measure. Not unusually, the reader is stunned by how severe and encouraging the dominical voice can be with regard to the same listening church.

Thyatira, for example:

Now I say to the rest of you in Thyatira, to you who do not hold to her teaching and have not learned Satan’s so-called deep secrets (I will not impose any other burden on you): Only hold on to what you have until I come. To him who overcomes and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations— ‘He will rule them with an iron scepter; he will dash them to pieces like pottery’—just as I have received authority from my Father. I will also give him the morning star. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

The italicized words come from the second psalm, which contains a message from YHWH to his human delegate on Zion that is routinely quoted by the New Testament and early Christian literature as an anticipatory description of Christ’s dominion over the nations. (more…)

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bridle: 2nd John

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 11, 2009| Leave a Comment »

We take for granted at this late evening of Enlightenment’s day that truth is to be discovered by the earnest, individual seeker. Nothing stands above his range of movement as independent investigator, no truth looms larger than he, no calculation of danger is to be admitted. (more…)

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terrifying purposefulness: Daniel 7

Posted in textures, tagged , , on November 30, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Committed fans of sweetness and light need not consult seventh chapter of the biblical book of Daniel.

Placed in the time of the weak-kneed Babylonian king Belshazzar—it is notable how much the brute power of empire compensates for frailty at the top—the story shows us the Judahite exile Daniel terrified by his bizarre night-time visions.

They are not, to put it mildly, a pretty sight. Waves of animalesque imagery flood the man’s brain. These are interpreted as the comings and goings of great empires, a theme that ought to have made Belshazzar’s knees knock still more. Empires, after all, presume and when necessary insist upon their own permanence.

The exile’s dreams say otherwise. (more…)

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commands and the commanded: Daniel 5

Posted in textures, tagged , , on November 28, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Badly as Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar comes off, he is the moral equivalent of a rock star when placed alongside his pitiable son Belshazzar. For all his overweening pride, the pater familias of this dubious tribe at least learned the lesson that ‘the God of the heavens is sovereign over the affairs of men and gives rule and power to whomever he wills’. Thought it took becoming an animal to figure this out, the biblical book of Daniel at least credits the now defunct Nebuchadnezzar for his tuition.

Not so Belshazzar the son, a man who earns that lamentable historical badge of being the last leader of an empire. Belshazzar will learn nothing and will die in the very night his chickens come home to roost. (more…)

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flirting with (epistemological) disaster: Psalm 119

Posted in textures, tagged , , on November 27, 2009| Leave a Comment »

One should spare a merciful thought for the writer of an acrostic.

Whether required to bend his pen to the task or the victim of his own enthusiastic but self-incarcerating ambition, the man or woman who sits down to write a poem wherein each sequence of lines begins with the same letter of the alphabet does not merit our scorn. If his result sounds wooden or inauthentic he deserves, at worst, our pity and, more charitably, the benefit of our aesthetic doubts.

Take the writer of the exceedingly long one hundred and nineteenth psalm, for example. Some ninety-seven verses into his long, parallelistic slog, he wrestles with the glories of YHWH’s revelation, on the one hand, and the letter mem (the Hebrew equivalent of our English letter m) on the other. (more…)

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deporting, revealing: Daniel 2

Posted in textures, tagged , , on November 26, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Babylon’s king Nebuchadnezzar does not come off well in the biblical book of Daniel. It is not difficult to find in the text’s description of his behavior the definition of a neurotic fool.

Yet below the obvious humorous touches in the book’s way of telling a story, a more subtle irony may be detected. Frankly, it is difficult to know whether this kind of thing is really there or whether we read it into the text because we rather like this kind of thing. One such soft-spoken irony is borne along by the Aramaic word gala’ and related forms. (more…)

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ROI: Proverbs 28

Posted in textures, tagged , , on November 21, 2009| Leave a Comment »

We parents watch attentively for the return on our investment.

Parenting is not a catch-and-release endeavor nor a spectator sport. To the contrary, our identity is wrapped up in the results. To some degree, they define us.

Those who keep the law are wise children,
but companions of gluttons shame their parents.

We have tools, with our modern discourse of individualism and our casual approach to rectitude, for letting ourselves off the hook quite quickly when our grown child runs amock. Indeed, we may have needed to react against the rigid assumptions that wrote off a parent for another adult’s deeds. (more…)

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coherence: Proverbs 28

Posted in textures, tagged , , on November 19, 2009| Leave a Comment »

When we unreflectively take ‘democracy’ as our self-evident starting point, we gain individual rights and untrammeled liberties at the loss of other blessings. The economic and social benefits of prizing liberty are so obvious that we absolutize them. We convert the gift into the god. We idolize the product rather than the maker.

We behave stupidly, mistaking the part for the whole. We become fools.

It may be impossible for us to share all the assumptions that undergird the biblical proverbs. Indeed it may be unwise. History means something and ‘originalist’ attempts to re-make our society according to an ancient blue-print always fail. We are called to be wise, not antiquarian. (more…)

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