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Posts Tagged ‘biblical reflection’

the necessity of flesh: 2 John

Posted in textures, tagged , , , on November 8, 2007| Leave a Comment »

The Johannine letters obsess over a matter that seems a point of detail to readers intoxicated with the idea that action rather than ideas are the important thing. Jesus’ ‘coming in the flesh’ is stated over and over as a deadly serious litmus test by which true believers may be discerned over against those who traffic in lies. (more…)

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shakedown, breakdown … new strength: Daniel 9-10

Posted in textures, tagged , , on November 8, 2007| Leave a Comment »

It is so often this way when the Lord or his messenger confronts a prophet-to-be in the biblical literature. The chosen mortal quakes in fear, falls upon his face, confesses that he’s nothing but a child, trembles in awe of the messenger and his Sender. One recognizes a familar pattern, a classifiable response. It is usually this way when heaven and earth mingle, the men and women at the seam of these two realities suffering the almost unspeakable angst that accompanies the unsought terror of standing at the juncture. (more…)

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family resemblance: 1 John 3

Posted in textures, tagged , , , on November 5, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Among the strongest claims that the New Testament makes bold to present is the idea of our divine parentage and, therefore, our family likeness to Jesus. Awash in the notion of love as the foundational component of Christian life, the first Johannine letter discerns divine initiative at the root of this familial inclusion. Paul would have called it ‘adoption’. The Johannine tradition captures the same objective while avoiding that distinctive Pauline vocabulary:

See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.

(more…)

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schooling Daniel

Posted in denkschrift, missio dei, tagged , , on November 4, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Some human endeavors run stubbornly against statistical probability. Fishing, for example, or standing in to the batter’s box. Or training a Labrador puppy.

Reflecting this Autumn morning on the education of the biblical Daniel, I wince more strongly than ever at the short-horizoned pragmatism that pervades our view of preparation for Christian leadership today. A thoughtless consensus seems to make hay with the expense in terms of time and money of preparing such leaders through formal means. We think we ought to be batting about .950—though no one ever says that—and so we grow resentful and dismissive at, say, a solid .310. (more…)

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being there: Daniel 1-2

Posted in textures, tagged , , on November 4, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Before the book of Daniel even gets to the Babylonian king’s weird dream and self-destructive behavior with his would-be advisors, a remarkable scenario is unfolded before the reader: the faithful Jew in the court of the foreign king. (more…)

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a subterranean flow: Jeremiah 33–35

Posted in textures, tagged , , on November 2, 2007| 2 Comments »

When the Bible traffics in unconditional promises and everlasting guarantees, the modern reader easily loses the thread. This is in part because our view of history is less dramatic than that assumed by large portions of the biblical narrative.

We read such promise as verbal guarantee of an uninterrupted status quo. On the contrary, the narrative itself posits a dilemma that YHWH cannot or will not leave unresolved. Its point of reference is not the each-minute-of-all-minutes status of a promise, but rather the final outcome of history or of some large segment of history. YHWH is presumed to rule sovereignly over the story and to promise that a certain outcome will stand. It is understood that interruption and hiatus will from time to time be the experience of the people, a matter that creates both tension and expectation. (more…)

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Jeremiah 27–28: good news lies

Posted in textures, tagged , , on November 1, 2007| Leave a Comment »

With an unusual dramatic touch, Jeremiah faces off against a YHWH-prophet whose message of good news and spectacular deliverance from the Babylonian besieger must have sounded with a welcome ring in encircled Jerusalem. Hananiah’s symbolic and verbal artistry can be understood in a manner that aligns them with the more lyric moments of the book of Isaiah or even the consoling passages within the book of Jeremiah itself. (more…)

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complicating everything: Titus 1

Posted in textures, tagged , , on October 31, 2007| Leave a Comment »

For a man who occasionally becomes quite difficult to comprehend, Paul and his tradition have only the most modest tolerance for people who complicate straight-forward things. (more…)

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Jeremiah 29-30: making the best of Babylon

Posted in textures, tagged , , on October 31, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Jeremiah comes down to us not only as the weeping prophet. He is also a most realistic seer.

The text allows us to intuit the presence of many prophetic good-timers, making their rounds in the streets of besieged Jerusalem and claiming against the evidence of the Babylonian troops just over the wall that YHWH would never allow his prime-time city to be destroyed. They proclaimed an imminent miracle, an inviolable city, and an unconditional divine choice. (more…)

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sound doctrine: 1 Timothy 6

Posted in textures, tagged , , on October 26, 2007| Leave a Comment »

For ears like the one attached to both sides of this writer’s head, ‘sound doctrine’ has an unpleasant ring.

The baggage is heavy. It seems the pious moniker of a narrow orthodoxy’s obsession with reigning in any inquisitive soul who might dare to follow the evidence where it leads. To a biblical scholar it hints at the wished-for sovereignty that is credited to more ‘systematic’ theologians over the messiness of the biblical text and its stubborn resistance to being reduced to, well, ‘doctrine’. Let alone sound doctrine, which suggests an even finer sieve. (more…)

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