Posted in textures, tagged 2 Peter, biblical reflection, Peter, textures on November 30, 2007| Leave a Comment »
The alienation of knowledge from loving action in the life of human beings and human communities is hardly a modern problem. Yet the systematic divorce of ‘mind and heart’ or ‘heart and head’ arguably is.
Only a post-Descartian distinction of the knowing being from the object of his or her knowledge could become the breeding ground for the dualism the has become received truth for generations of Bible readers who promptly project such epistemological nonsense back onto its pages. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged 2 Peter, biblical reflection, Peter, textures on November 29, 2007| Leave a Comment »
It is easy to wonder about the logical thread that purports to string together a chain of human virtues in consecutive fashion. It looks like artifice, like all form and no function, like empty words. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged 1 Peter, biblical reflection, Ezekiel, Peter, textures on November 28, 2007| Leave a Comment »
It is difficult to take the measure of rubble.
One cannot tell where one wall ended and another began. To guess the function of the buildings that are now this pile of stone is the stuff of speculation. One can only wonder who lived here, who died, who loved, who screamed, who longed for something better than this mountain of rock and dust. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Ezekiel, textures on November 26, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Ezekiel makes for hard reading.
My own rather buoyant hopefulness has taken some hits in these weeks of reading slowly through this insistent book, determined as it is to mark out the profile of Israel’s failure and cut the ground from under false optimism. The text is punctuated by theodicy—what some have defined as ‘justifying the ways of God to man’—by the phrase ‘Then you shall know that I am YHWH’. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Ezekiel, textures on November 24, 2007| Leave a Comment »
It is important to the ethos of the book of Ezekiel that doomed people have been warned.
The logic of divine castigation requires this. Just as the desolation wrought by his overdue judgement will indicate to survivors that YHWH has been about (‘Then you shall know that I am YHWH …’), so it is important that people will have heard the voice of YHWH’s warning prior to the destruction of all that is dear to them. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Hebrews, textures on November 16, 2007| Leave a Comment »
The writer of this sermonic piece knows that faith can be told as a story.
Though faith can be approached analytically, definitionally, abstractly, its gleam emerges best through the stories of the faithful. Men and women act in ways that defy this world’s logic. They refuse to hedge their bets. They put all their eggs in just one basket. They toss caution to the wind, throwing themselves into action both noble and self-sacrificing because the gravity of their lives pivots not on the fragile shelf of self-preservation but rather on the bedrock of divine promise. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Ezekiel, Hebrews, textures on November 14, 2007| Leave a Comment »
One of the New Testament’s most haunting lines is a simple affirmation about what is worthy of our fear:
It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrews 10.31)
For the careful reader, all manner of presumption falls victim to such clarity. Grace, we are told in the magisterial tractate that is the ‘letter to the Hebrews’, is no pretext for the kind of falling back that betrays a rescuing, empowering God whose purposes for his followers lean forward. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Ezekiel, textures on November 11, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Ezekiel is perhaps the biblical anthology’s oddest prophet.
His written legacy combines the close-order attention to form and process that is common to the priest he was. Yet priestly conviction becomes combined to occasionally weird effect with the apocalyptic tendency to receive messages from God when the heavens are opened. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Revelation, textures on November 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Christian faith hinges upon the relationship between God and humankind. Specifically, it discerns in the person of Jesus Christ a mystery that probes at the edges of monotheistic conviction while fully embracing it. Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully human, a conviction sketched out in the New Testament but requiring centuries before its formulation in more or less classical form in the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian Definition.
Christians do well to call this a ‘mystery’, not because it is antithetical to careful reasoning but because it is deeply paradoxical. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Daniel, textures on November 9, 2007| Leave a Comment »
When biblical prophets and seers look to the future that lies still over their horizon, they peer though a wide lens. The scope and scale become vast.
As the Ancient of Days appears in the book of Daniel’s seventh chapter, we are told that:
A thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending him.
Canter Bridge 