Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Hosea, textures on December 12, 2007| Leave a Comment »
The words bear the weight of scandal:
I will destroy you, O Israel;
who can help you?
Where now is your king, that he may save you?Where in all your cities are your rulers,
of whom you said, ‘Give me a king and rulers’?
I gave you a king in my anger,
and I took him away in my wrath. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Hosea, textures on December 11, 2007| Leave a Comment »
At the intersection of faith and culture, the greatest miscalculations occur when foolish minds equate prosperity with blessing. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Hosea, textures on December 11, 2007| Leave a Comment »
It is a good thing to find oneself in the care of a gifted physician. It is an oddly redemptive experience to know him also as one’s assailant.
This is the logic that is brought to bear by the Old Testament prophet Hosea, who finds promise in urging Israel to return to its convenantal Punisher in order to avail itself of his medicinal prowess:
Come, let us return to the LORD;
for it is he who has torn, and he will heal us;
he has struck down, and he will bind us up.
Posted in textures, tagged 3 John, biblical reflection, John, textures on December 8, 2007| Leave a Comment »
By the time the writer gets to his exquisitely synthetic declaration, the Johannine tradition has already provided a reference point in the shadow of which mean dualisms fade:
Beloved, do not imitate what is evil but imitate what is good. Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God.
The ‘Johannine community’ is a hypothetical entity that serves a deliciously heuristic role in the interpretation of the corresponding literature, even in those moments when nobody is quite sure what it is. One need not be skeptical about speculation so long as it knows its own mood. Probing for the legacy of John in a historical human community is no idle task and was carried out with particular élan by, say, the late Raymond Brown, S.S. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged 1 John, biblical reflection, John, textures on December 5, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Only rarely does human language capture such a rich swath of reality in a short declaration as here:
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.
Human experience could almost be considered a fleshing out of this fundamental dogma. (more…)
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…)
Canter Bridge 