Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Isaiah, textures on October 16, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Arguably the most astonishing feature of the biblical meta-narrative is YHWH’s penchant for employing unqualified agents in the execution of his finest work.
Some texts articulate this as the means of assuring that YHWH alone receives the glory of the outcome, a matter that causes no embarrassment to biblical aesthetics. Others simply record the fact, allowing the reader to configure the motive. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Philippians, textures on October 15, 2007| Leave a Comment »
A strong habit of mind suggests that you cannot command love and you cannot command joy. One enjoys no mandate over one’s feelings. What one feels, according to this usually unquestioned view, simply is what it is.
To attempt control over the nature and course of one’s emotions is to spit into the wind. Worse, it is a genuine betrayal of the self-evident authenticity of feeling. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Philippians, textures on October 12, 2007| Leave a Comment »
It is at least curious and more likely significant that the apostle Paul lodges such a pragmatic exhortation in the framework of a theological reflection upon Christ’s intelligent, self-aware humiliation:
Do all things without murmuring and arguing.
Paul’s argument is rich with counter-cultural nuance. It stands on its head the accepted, prudent, self-evident consensus about getting one’s way, getting ahead. It asks out loud whether life as strife is really the truth it claims to be or, rather, the most self-limiting of lies. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Isaiah, textures on October 12, 2007| Leave a Comment »
It may be that only those who know their weakness can profit from a discourse on strength. It is plausible that only those who have stumbled badly, wilted under an unwavering sun, exhausted all illusion of self-empowerment can embrace the notion of divine sovereignty over their wretched, torn lives.
It may be that prophetic literature like the fortieth chapter of Isaiah reckons more clearly with such a paradox than ten thousand trucks full of self-help literature, enslaved as the latter is to the notion that we are capable meaningfully of rising up from the ditches into which life shoves us, with our consent or without it. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Isaiah, textures on October 8, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Though the move from exile to ‘consolation’ in the complex plot of the book called Isaiah is signaled in chapter 35, the door swings all the way open on its hinges in chapter 40. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Isaiah, textures on October 7, 2007| Leave a Comment »
The Assyrian emissary Rab-Shekah casts public doubt on all that Jerusalemites have learned to believe about themselves, their city, and their guardian deity. Moreover, he refuses to deliver his message in the dulcet tones of diplomatic Aramaic, choosing instead to stop the hearts of the common people on the wall by elaborating his terrifying ultimatum in the common Judahite dialect.
It is a moment when hearts shake like the leaves of wind-blown trees. Nervous glances are cast in the direction of the king’s palace and the prophet’s house. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Isaiah, textures on October 6, 2007| Leave a Comment »
The language of the landscape rejoicing is particularly powerful because one normally thinks of the ground beneath our feet as a stage, not a performer. It is inert, the platform and the background of the interesting and significant activities of those who appear upon it. (more…)
Posted in denkschrift, tagged biblical reflection, Philippians, textures on October 5, 2007| Leave a Comment »
When the apostle Paul turns to address his much-loved friends in Philippi, the warmth of his rhetoric flows like the melting waters of Springtime. Gone is the parental indignation of Galatians, the costly renegotiation of wounded relationships that is never far away in his correspondence with the Corinthians.
In his letter to the Philippian Christians, Paul writes like a man who has come home. The sweet absence of drama flavors the exchange. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Ephesians, textures on October 4, 2007| 1 Comment »
Paul might be accused of possessing a rather egregious blind spot when it comes to matters of what we blithely label ‘social justice’. In this final chapter of his letter to the Ephesians, he counsels submission and a posture that is easily misconstrued as passivity in the face of the regnant social stratifications of Greco-Roman society.
‘Stay where you are’ is—prima facie—about as radical a statement as his social conscious is able to produce. (more…)
Posted in textures, tagged biblical reflection, Ephesians, textures on October 3, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Paul, who with a purist’s zeal plundered the lives and networks of the earliest Christians, remains in his apostolic career deeply aware of how his actions had stripped him of all credentials based in status or achievement. Something akin to guilt with its barb removed presses him to describe himself with self-deprecating clauses like ‘the greatest of sinners’ or—as here in Ephesians 3—’the very least of all the saints’. (more…)
Canter Bridge 