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Those interested in Biblical Theology and related subjects will find a wealth of thoughtful and thought-provoking material here: http://beginningwithmoses.org/

Gregory charges Eunomius (11.5) with undermining the efficacy of sacraments.  Eunomius claims, “we, in agreement with holy and blessed men; affirm that the mystery of godliness does not consist in venerable names, nor in the distinctive character of customs and sacramental tokens, but in exactness of doctrine.”

Gregory charges that this treats “the sacrament of regeneration as an idle thing, the mystic oblation as profitless, and the participation in them as of no advantage to those who are partakers therein.”  He follows Manicheans, Montanists, Marcionites and others who say that “neither the confession of sacred names, nor the customs of the church, nor her sacramental tokens, are a ratification of godliness.”  For the orthodox, “the mystery of godliness is ratified by the confession of the Divine Names . . . and our salvation is confirmed by participation in the sacramental customs and tokens.”

Is this low sacramental theology inherent in Arianism?  Does Arianism lead to denial of sacramental efficacy?  Or, is a low view of sacramental efficacy a sign of Arian or Arianizing Christology?  Gregory seems to think there are connections.

One of them has to do with the names of the Triune persons.  According to Eunomius, the “confessions of the reverend and precious names of the Holy Trinity is useless,” and that is not surprising since in his fundamental theology he denies the truth of the names of the Son.  Scripture calls Jesus Lord, God, eternal Word, only-begotten, and Eunomius questions the legitimacy of all those names.  Consistently, he denies the power of those names in the sacraments of the church.

Also, implicit in Arian Christology is the notion that there is a Supreme power that transcends that of the Son.  There is a God above and beyond the names of God, a God above and beyond the Triune Name into which one is baptized.  What is important, then, is the mystical transport past the Son and the church’s ordinances to the realm of the Ungenerate Father.

Eunomius’ denial of the deity of the Son also casts doubt on the truth of the Son’s words.  When the Son urges that a man cannot enter the kingdom without being born of water and Spirit, or when He offers His flesh and blood as our food and drink, Eunomius is not sure we can trust those words.

Gregory in any case has severe words for those who deny the power of sacraments: “They who in act deny the faith . . . and judge the sanctification effected by the sacramental tokens to be worthless . . . what else are they than transgressors of the doctrines of salvation?”

A line from Dickinson: “the nerves sit ceremonious like tombs.”  This is an extremely complex literary device, or set of devices.

First, personification: The nerves “sit” like people, and sit in a particular way, ceremoniously.

Second, the personification spreads out to evoke a scene.  Ceremonious sitting takes place in church, at weddings, or, as in this poem, at funerals.

Third, the personification itself is encompassed and somewhat canceled by another device, the concluding simile.  The whole scene of nerves-sitting-ceremoniously is compared to “tombs.”

Fourth, this creates a scene change: The ceremoniously sitting nerves are now tombstones in a cemetery.

In sum: Nerves are people.  But the people are like tombstones.  So nerves are people who are tombstones.

And all in six words.

A student, Heather Denigan, is working on Emily Dickinson, and pointed me to this remarkable poem about baptism:

I’m ceded, I’ve stopped being theirs;
The name they dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church,
Is finished using now,
And they can put it with my dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools
I’ve finished threading too.

Baptized before without the choice,

But this time consciously, of grace

Unto supremest name,
Called to my full, the crescent dropped,
Existence’s whole arc filled up
With one small diadem.

My second rank, too small the first,
Crowned, crowing on my father’s breast,
A half unconscious queen;
But this time, adequate, erect,
With will to choose or to reject.
And I choose — just a throne.

Dickinson, renouncing her baptism as a childish toy, shows a deeper understanding of what baptism entails than many who continue in the faith.

Creation, Gregory of Nyssa insists, is not eternal: “For we have learned that the heaven and the earth were not from eternity, and will not last to eternity, and thus it is hence clear that those things are both started from some beginning, and will surely cease at some end.”

On the other hand: “the Divine Nature, being limited in no respect, but passing all limitations on every side in its infinity, is far removed from those marks which we find in creation.”

But then: “that power which is without interval, without quantity, without circumscription, having in itself all the ages and all the creation that has taken place in them, and over-passing at all points, by virtue of the infinity of its own nature, the unmeasured extent of the ages, either has no mark which indicates its nature, or has one of an entirely different sort, and not that which the creation has.”

That is, while creation is not eternal, all the ages and intervals that make up the creation are contained within the eternal, infinite, divine nature.  Creation is pre-contained in God.  How, indeed, could it be otherwise.

As a side note: Note the unargued movement from talk about “the Divine Nature” to talk about “that power.”  A point developed well by Rene Michel Barnes, and one that warms the heart of Robert Jenson.

When I made some sharp comments about Thomas Oord’s book on love a few weeks back, Oord wrote to inform me that he’s written another book that deals more overtly with the themes I found lacking in his other book.  Oord conceded that I might remain unsatisfied even then, but I thought it only fair to take a look at the fuller account (The Nature of Love: A Theology).  As he expected, I do remain unsatisfied, and how.

One of the alarming recent developments within “open theism” is the overt renunciation of creatio ex nihilo.  As Oord argues, rightly, “A God who can create something from nothing is a God whose power and resources are apparently unlimited. . . . The God whose unlimited power created something from nothing is capable of completely controlling that which God creates – which is everything.”  Then he pushes the argument to say that creatio ex nihilo implies that God is “culpable for failing to control creatures” and so to “prevent genuine evil.”  I don’t agree with the last point, but the challenge is a powerful one, and Oord is correct to stress (over against many who deny it) that this strong form of sovereignty is inherent in the doctrine of creation.

A God who controls everything is a problem for Oord because he wants a theology that makes it impossible for God to coerce, because, on his account, coercion is incompatible with love.

He writes, “One of the keys to constructing an adequate theology of love is to portray God as unable to coerce.  This means God cannot entirely control others.  An adequate theology of love, however, should present God as almighty.  Being almighty need not entail the capacity to coerce others, in the sense of overriding, withdrawing, or failing to offer freedom.  Coercion and love are irreconcilable.”

The logic of the position is impeccable: To protect human freedom, we need to adjust the classical doctrine of God so that He’s no longer in complete control of the world.  And to ensure that He’s not in complete control of the world, we need to deny creatio ex nihilo, because a God who can create from nothing looks a lot like the God that Calvin worshiped, and we can’t have that.

I find little persuasive in Oord’s positive argument, but let me highlight only one point that, to my mind, pulls the rug from his whole project.  Jettison creatio ex nihilo, and what’s left?  A God who creates from something existing alongside.  And how does this God-who-cannot-create-from-nothing shape that something into the world we know?  He’s gotta struggle with it.  Oord cites, with apparent approval, Jon Levenson’s claim that “We can capture the essence of the idea of creation in the Hebrew Bible with the word ‘mastery,” and Oord himself adds that in creation “God is the victor in combat” over enemies that “existed prior to God’s creating the universe.”  He also cites Rolf Knierim’s claim that creation is like redemption, “Yahweh is the creator of the world because he is its liberator from chaos, just as he is the creator of Israel because he is its liberator from oppression.”

Now, “mastery” and “victor in combat” and “liberation from oppression” all sound terribly coercive to my ear.  Creation is like redemption from Egypt – as in, Yahweh brings plagues and beats down the chaos in order to liberate order?  For Oord, apparently, God’s relation to creation is, at its initiation, coercive.  While, on the other hand, those dreaded “classical theists” speak of creation as a gift of being, of created existence as existence by participation, which is to say, by the continuous generous outpouring of the Spirit.  Who’s got the better-founded theology of love?  Oord’s position doesn’t sound at all like an ontology of love to me.  It’s a reiteration of pagan/modern/postmodern ontologies of violence.

Oord does identify some problems in traditional accounts of love (in Augustine, for instance), but his solution is worse than the disease.  And he doesn’t always hit home with his criticisms.  I doubt anyone would find “God’s freedom from us is more important than God’s love for us” a recognizable summary of Barth.

It seems common-sensical that the existence of something logically precedes its self-expression.

Trinitarian theology assaults that common sense.  There is no Father except as He has a Son; no Father who has not always already generated His perfect image and likeness; no God who has not always already expressed Himself in His eternal Word.

It is so for everything.  The table across the room doesn’t intend to express itself visually to me, but if it didn’t then I wouldn’t know it was there.  I think it fair to say that a table that completely and entirely failed to express itself would be a not-table.

For humans, there is often a gap between what we are and what we pretend to be.  There is still an unbreakable link between existence and self-expression, though the self-expression is a false image.  That is our fallenness, or (perhaps) our immaturity.  For God, there is perfect, spontaneous correspondence between what He is and how He shows Himself.

I’m not convinced Gregory’s argument from opposites (Against Eunimius 9.4) is sound, but it’s intriguing and engaging.

Here’s the argument: Certain realities have direct opposites that cannot coexist.  Light cannot coexist with darkness, but expels and destroys it.  On the other hand, darkness can expel light.  So also with the oppositions of good/bad, falsehood/truth.  No middle terms exist here, but simple polarities.  So, in the creation account, before God calls light into being, there is only darkness.  Now, the Son is Light; and if the Son once was not, then what was could not be some neutral neither-light-nor-darkness, nor some middle light-darkness.  Before the Father generated the Son, there must have been darkness.

It “necessarily” follows that prior to the begetting of the Son, Eunomius’s god was enveloped in darkness: “surrounded by darkness instead of Light, by falsehood instead of truth, by death instead of life, by evil instead of good.”  If “ungenerate light” is one thing, and “generate light” is another, then it follows that “it is impossible that the light [that is, the generated light] should shine forth save out of darkness.”  Between the ungenerate and ungenerating light of the Father and the generated light of the Son is an “interval of darkness,” a cloud of unbeing from which or through which the Ungenerate Father has to cut in order to generate a Son.

One of the many interesting implications of this is that Arianism falls back into the ontology of violence characteristic of combat myths.  To begin to be productive, the ungenerate must contend with his opposite.  To generate or shine the light that Eunomius claims he is, he must first overcome darkness.  The god of Eunomius may be able to forge some kind of demiurge; he is incapable of creating in the way that Genesis says Yahweh creates.

Gregory charges Eunomius (10.2) with believing he can climb past the word to a direct encounter with the Ungenerate Father.  As Gregory sees it, Eunomius is saying that “the human mind, scrutinizing the knowledge of real existence, and lifting itself above the sensible and intelligible creation, will leave God the Word, Who was in the beginning, below itself, just as it has left below it all other things, and itself comes to be in Him in Whom God the Word was not, treading, by mental activity, regions which lie beyond the life of the Son, there searching for eternal life, where the Only-Begotten God is not.”

Powerful stuff.  In response, Gregory points to the Johannine claim that the Word is eternal life, and that life is in Him.  Why then seek eternal life by leaping over the word.  To that we may add: As Gregory shows, Arianism dissolved into mysticism, as the Arian climbs past the eternal Expression of the Father to gain access to the now-wordless Father.  Arianism is also a kind of gnosticism, not only because it’s claiming an extra-human degree of knowledge but also because it is leaving time and matter behind.  In leaping over the Son to get to the Father, Arians inevitably also leap over redemptive history, where the Word is made flesh.

Gregory’s got it right: We need nor should we want anything beyond the Word, beyond the incarnate Word in whom we have seen the indwelling Father, beyond the words that the Word speaks and inspires to be write, beyond the visible words by which He comes near to us.  There are no side or back doors to the Father, for Jesus and Jesus alone is the door.

The Sermon on the Mount begins with beatitudes, and the Olivet Discourse begins with Woes.  As N. T. Wright and others have shown, the two series are similar in a number of particulars.  The connections between the two discourses continue after the beatitudes/woes section, evident in significant verbal repetition.  To wit:

“Kill”: Jesus uses the verb in 5:21  After that it comes up only in Matthew in 19:18, until we get to 23, where it describes what scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites do (23:31, 35).

“Hell” (geenna): Used 7x in the book, 3x in ch. 5.   It’s found in 10:28; 18:9, and then as the destination of the disciples of the Pharisees and of the Pharisees themselves (23:15, 33).

“Altar”: Found in 5:23-24; 23:18-20, 35.

“Gift”: In 5:23-24, then 3x in ch 23:18-19.

Swearing by God’s throne comes up in both 5:23 and 23:22.

The sermon lays out a righteousness that surpasses the righteousness of the scribes.  In fact, it is a righteousness that in many particulars directly opposes the “righteousness” of the scribes and Pharisees.

Jesus sits on a mountain and opens His mouth to teach (Matthew 5:2).  The phrasing is unusual; I have found only one place in the OT  where opening the mouth is linked with teaching – Proverbs 31, 26, where it is the excellent woman who opens her mouth with wisdom and teaches kindness.

Earlier in Proverbs 31, the phrase is used a couple of times, not in connection with teaching but in connection with royal judgment.  Kings ought not open their mouths to drink wine and strong drink (v. 4), but they should instead open their mouths to be the mouthpiece for the dumb, to defend the righteous of the afflicted and needy (vv. 8-9).

Which is just what Jesus proceeds to do: As the King on the mountain, He pronounces blessings on the afflicted.

You are the salt of the earth.  You are a light on a lampstand.  Where does Jesus get this?  From the temple: Salt is added to the animal sacrifices, and in the Holy Place there are lights on lampstands.

Does he ever get into the Most Holy Place?  Yes: In Matthew 5:17-20, He speaks of His and the disciples’ relation to the law, to the tablets of the Torah that are in the ark.  In a sense, the entire sermon thereafter takes place in the Most Holy Place.

Bonhoeffer notes that the disciples had “bodily fellowship and communion” with Jesus, and that to follow Him they had to “cleave to him bodily.”  Because He was incarnate, “they live and suffer in bodily communion with him.”

The necessity of bodily communion with Jesus didn’t cease when He ascended and sent the Spirit: “It is certain that there can be no fellowship or communion with him except through his Body.  For only through that Body can we find acceptance and salvation” – even now, when HIs personal body is long absent.  And we come to participate in that body through Word and Sacrament: “Paul . . . rivets our membership of the Body of Christ exclusively to the two sacraments.”

Taking up and extending the argument of Hugh Lloyd-Jones’ The Justice of Zeus, William Allan argues that, contrary to common opinion, there si no real contrast between the operations of justice in the two Homeric epics.  Nor is “popular picture of ‘amoral’ or ’frivolous’ Homeric gods” accurate.

He argues that “simply to say of ‘divine justice’ in the Homeric poems that ‘this seems an unlikely role for the ‘time-seeking Olympians’ risks creating a false dichotomy, since the gods can be (and are) interested both in their own time and in wider issues of justice. Indeed, . . . any attempt to separate matters of time from wider issues of justice, whether among gods or humans, represents in itself a false dichotomy. . . . This is particularly true of such institutions as the oath and guest-friendship, where the gods’ concern for their own time is simultaneously a concern for justice.”  He argues further for “basic continuity between divine and human values: as social beings shaped by the relations among themselves, the gods value justice as much as humans do and are equally ready to assert a basic entitlement to honour and fair treatment, and to support the sanctions that ensure justice and punish its violation. Thus values such as justice are . . .  socially constituted on both the divine and human planes, and each level displays not only a hierarchy of power (and the resulting tensions), but also a structure of authority.”

In a 1982 article on justice in the Oresteia in the American Political Science Review, Peter Euben observes that the dualism of passion and action, violence adn renewal, obliteration and revelation that stymies politics and ethics in Argos seem to be overcome in the just city of Athens: “Certainly the Athens we see on stage at the end of the Eumenides shows (or at least indicates) men and women as partners in sustaining a whole which gives identity and dignity to each, rather than as victims of each other’s actions. Similarly young and old are not warring factions but mutual participants in a collectivity that communalizes the burdens of action while providing object and limit for passion. In Athens the deeds of children do not murder those of parents but enlarge them.  Freed from the mechanical cycle of revenge and the life-destroying passins which paralyzed action in the Agamemnon, these Athenians will participate in framing their own destiny in conjunction with the gods.”

But this is only a partial victory: “Yet even a just city is composed of mortals and thus of potentially warring forces.  Athens too must rely on those passions and actions whose destructiveness we have seen in the Agamemnon. Though the just polis does offer respite from injustice and corruption it is only a respite. Even if it can turn ruinous forces toward good, the dual capacity of passion and action remain.   That is why all resolution is but temporary.”  This is the best Aeschylus can offer; there is no city of the blessed, no permanently just city, no city of God.

INTRODUCTION

Isaiah “sees” a “vision” (1:1), but what he sees is a call to “hear” (1:2; cf. 2:1: “the word that Isaiah . . . saw”).  Like John, Isaiah turns to the Lord to “see” the voice speaking to him (Revelation 1:12).  It’s a voice of warning; it’s a vision of desolation.

THE TEXT

“The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. ‘Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth!’  For the LORD has spoken. . . .” (Isaiah 1:1-9).

HEAR

Isaiah’s prophecy proper begins with the command to “Hear,” which is doubled with the verb form of the word “ear” (as in “lend your ears”; 1:2).  Yahweh calls on heaven and earth to stand as witnesses as He makes His case against Judah (cf. Deuteronomy 31:28; 32:1!).  The phrasing reminds us of Israel’s great confession, the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, Yahweh your God, Yahweh is one.  You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).  With this echo, Yahweh is reminding Judah that He is the one and only God of heaven and earth (cf. Isaiah 37:16; 40:22; 42:5), and that they are called to love Him.  There is a tragic contrast with the rest of verse 2: Judah has not heard; Judah does not love.

SONS, OXEN, ASSES

Israel is Yahweh’s son (Exodus 4:23), but Yahweh charges that the people of Judah are disrespectful sons.  He has “made them great,” but instead of responding with grateful obedience they started an insurrection against their Father and King (the verb “rebel” is used in 1 Kings 12:19; 2 Kings 1:1; 3:5, 7; 8:20; cf. Isaiah 66:24!).  In verse 3, he shifts from familial to agricultural imagery.  Judah is a herd of oxen, or an ox, but doesn’t know enough to seek out her master.  Donkeys are unclean animals, but even unclean animals (representing Gentiles) seek out the manger of a master.  Judah lacks knowledge, and particularly the discernment to distinguish and judge between right and wrong.

SINFUL NATION, STRICKEN BODY

Judah has become “glorious” (“heavy,” v. 4) with sin and iniquity.  The seed of Abraham has become a “seed of evildoers”; Yahweh’s children have become destroyers, and destroyers are destroyed (cf. Genesis 6:11-13).  Judah is an unfaithful bride who “forsakes” her Husband (v. 4; cf. Genesis 3:24). Husband and Bride are “estranged,” and so strangers will devour them (the verb “gone away” in v. 4 has the same root as “stranger” in v. 7).  Yahweh declares that He is the Holy One of Israel (v. 4), Judah’s true sanctuary and protection.  As the Holy One, He should be treated with reverence and fear, but Judah provokes Him instead.  Verses 5-6 present a sickening portrait of rebellious Judah.  The once-beautiful bride of Yahweh is filled with festering sores, and there is no physician to bandage her wounds.

DESOLATE LAND

Verse 7 describes Judah’s situation more literally: Strangers have invaded the land, burned cities, and eaten its produce.  Isaiah is probably describing the devastating Assyrian invasion around 701 (cf. 2 Kings 18:13).  As a result, Daughter Zion, Jerusalem or the temple itself, is no longer a glorious place within a fruitful land, but reduced to a small cottage in a field (v. 8).  The destruction is nearly total.  Only the sliver of a remnant separates Judah from Sodom and Gomorrah (v. 9).

From what I can see, Isaiah uses the root yasha, “save,” 48 times in his prophecy.  ”Salvation” (yeshua) appears 19 times, while the verb, used both in the perfect/imperfect (“save”) and as a substantive participle (“Savior”) appears 29 times.  Isaiah’s name which contains the same root, appears 16 times.

48 is an interesting number, of course.  4 x 12 is the obvious breakdown, Israel saved to the four corners of the land, Israel saved/rescued from the four corners of the earth.

Interestingly, go’el, “Redeemer” or “Kinsman-Redeemer,” apears 24 times.

Because of an invasion (probably of Assyrians), Daughter Zion  is left like a hut in a “cucumber field” (Isaiah 1:8).  It’s clearly an image of diminished glory: Jerusalem or the temple was once a glory of the earth, now it’s no more than a hut.

But Isaiah probably chose the word because it forms a pun.  Cucumber field is miqshah while “sanctuary” is miqdash (built from qadash, “holy”).  Daughter Zion has been reduced from Yahweh’s holy dwelling place, His miqdash, to a lowly bungalow.

Borrowing from the Song of Songs, Isaiah describes Judah the Bride from head to foot.  He moves from head to heart to foot and back to head (1:5-6).  Four body parts are mentioned (3 different, with “head” used twice).  He is inspecting Judah to the four corners.

Instead of a beautiful and seductive bride, though, she has become filled with blemishes and oozing sores.  The four body parts are matched by the fourfold description of her illness: wounds, bruises, puetrefying, sores (v. 6).

Judah has become completely unsound.  The word is metom, and related to the root tamam, “to be complete.”  She is imperfect, full of blemishes, and, unlike the Bride of the Song, wholly unsuitable as bridal food for Yahweh.

Isaiah begins with the charge that Yahweh’s “sons,” the people of Judah, have “rebelled” against Him.  The word is frequently used of political insurrection (1 Kings 12:19; 2 Kings 1:1; 3:5, 7; 8:20).  Judah has become a nation of insurrectionists against her divine King.

Isaiah ends on the same note, with a vision of what will happen to the insurrectionists in Judah.  The very last verse tells us that all flesh will “go forth and look on the corpses of the men who have transgressed against Me.  For their worm shall not die, and their fire shall not be quenched.”