For those wondering at the long silence on this website, it is the holidays. I am happily busy playing games and telling stories, reading out loud and conversing. Here I am in the midst of an animated and sound effect laden rendition of the three little pigs. Nathaniel is an attentive listener.
Re-reading Neil Elliott’s wonderful The Rhetoric of Romans: Argumentative Constraint and Strategy and Paul’s Dialogue with Judaism, I was taken by this concluding passage :
The letter includes paraenesis (chs. 12-15) grounded in a sustained enthymemetic argument (chs. 1-11) that disposes the ‘mercy of God’ (cf. 12.1) as cohering in God’s righteousness …
The letter effectively reconstellates principal convictions of the Hellenistic-Christian κερυγμα particular among these being the christological-soteriological symbolization of Christ’s atoning death ‘for us’, the ethical status of Gentile Christians as those ‘not under the Law’, and what has been called the ‘replacement theory’, that is, the conviction that Gentiles have been incorporated in salvation history in such a way as to supplant Israel, who have rejected their Messiah…
[Paul] addresses the Romans as Gentile Christians, and it is precisely as such that they are to respond to him as the Apostle to the Gentiles. If the letter is to be appropriated theologically in the modern situation, the exegesis presented above suggests that such appropriation might more properly read Romans along these lines: Its address to Gentile Christians as such, rather than its mistakenly supposed systematic or dogmatic character, should give Romans whatever catholicity it may enjoy.
N. Elliott, The Rhetoric of Romans (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), 291-2.
The book, while dense, was delightful - a challenge to the ‘Lutheran captivity’ (ah, the choice irony of the phrase) of the apostle.
N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain takes the reader on a sojourn, an evocative pilgrimage of memory and longing. The journey through the landscape of the text and of the American west moves the reader in a way that is inexpressible and immeasurable; it moves the reader to long, to linger, and to sigh. Memory for Momaday, the memory embodied in the text, conveys not narrative, but description; not events, but moments, glimpses, feelings, and, above all, longing. Before we read the text, we are unaware of our deficiency, our lack of the ghosts that haunt our landscape; after reading, we are filled with the ache of memories that cannot be ours, memories that run in the blood and are worn like scars.
Momaday tells the story - if it can be called ’story,’ for no action occurs - of his pilgrimage to his grandmother’s grave on the knoll that is known as Rainy Mountain. His pilgrimage retraces the journey of his ancestors the Kiowa from Yellowstone to the Wichita Range. Each step of the journey conveys memories - memories that are not Momaday’s own, but belong to the land and to the Kiowa.
Continue reading ‘Pilgrimage and Longing:
N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, a review’
Notes from Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, 2nd ed. (New York: Anchor Bible Reference Library, 1993).
There are alternate textual authorities - Codex Koridethi, Old Syriac (Sinaiticus) - which read that Joseph was Jesus’ biological father. The Old Syriac rendering of this passage is echoed in the 5th century Dialogue of Timothy and Aqila. It would be difficult to read these as the Matthean original, Brown argues, in light of 1:18-25.
The genealogies of Matthew and Luke are to be read theologically and functionally, rather than historically.
Thus, for Matthew, the genealogy of Jesus serves to identify him as son of Abraham - a gentilic connection - and Son of David - a messianic one.
For Luke, the genealogy is textually situated to support the statement made by the voice at the baptism that Jesus is God’s son.
There are numerous elisions and substitutions in both accounts. Matthew’s genealogy is based on the number fourteen; yet two of its three segments contain only thirteen generations. Fourteen may have been a reference by gematria to David (MT: DWD).
Both Luke and Matthew have different genealogies which culminate in Shealtiel and Zerubabbel. Neither are historical lists.
Before Nathaniel took his bath tonight, I read him three poems - Hop on Pop, Mr. Brown can Moo, Can You? and this:
A un poeta sajón
La nieve de Nortumbria ha conocido
Y ha olvidado la huella de tus pasos
Y son innumerables los ocasos
Que entre nosotros, gris hermano, han sido.
Lento en la lenta sombra labrarías
Metáforas de espadas en los mares
Y del horror que mora en los pinares
Y de la soledad que traen los días.
¿Dónde buscar tus rasgos y tu nombre?
Ésas son cosas que el antiguo olvido
Guarda. Nunca sabré cómo habrá sido
Cuando sobre la tierra fuiste un hombre.
Seguiste los caminos del destierro;
Ahora sólo eres tu cantar de hierro.from Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems, ed. Alexander Coleman (New York: Penguin Books, 2000).
Notes from Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, 2nd ed. (New York: Anchor Bible Reference Library, 1993).
Advent is upon us and I found this aperçu among my notes. I felt inclined to epexegetical expansion upon the didactic nature of fulfillment formulae in Matthew. For they are no longer read didactically but are naively depicted as apologetic. I am still pinched for time, however, and must refrain.
The composition of the basic Matthean narrative (1:18-2:23)
The key to the investigation of the composition of the basic Matthean narrative in 1:18-2:23 is the four or five explicit citations of scripture with introductory fulfillment formulae. Fulfillment formulae are almost entirely a Matthean peculiarity. Their purpose was didactic rather than proselytical or apologetic.
There are two logical explanations for this material. Either Matthew invented the narratives to fit the citations or he added the citations to pre-existing narratives. Brown points to the incongruent match between the citations and the narratives to argue against the idea that Matthew invented the narratives. I find this argument persuasive.
Matthew thus brought together and edited - redacted - pre-existing material, incorporating the fulfillment citations.
Brown provides us with three basic guides in detecting pre-Matthean material:
the “amount of Matthean vocabulary, style, and organizational pattern in verses or sections of the infancy narrative.” (105)
the “presence of internal tensions or conflicts .. indicating that two bodies of material may have been joined.” (106)
The presence of “parallels to other material.” (106)
Despite being hard at work on my thesis, I still have time to read to my children. This has always been one of my favorite activities.
Right now we are in the midst of reading The Hobbit, A Wind in the Door, and A Little History of the World.
Yesterday, Elizabeth and I read this passage:
Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, though they are usually untidy and dirty. Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to make to their design, prisoners and slaves that they have to work till they die for want of air and light. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (as it is called) so far.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 73.
For those of you who are wondering at my sporadic posting of quotations - I am in the thick of writing my thesis and have hardly a spare second for this website. I hope to be done soon and back to writing on a daily basis.
For now, here is the beginning of a poem that I re-read last night before bed.
On a Raised Beach
All is lithogenesis - or lochia,
Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree,
Stones blacker than any in the Caaba,
Cream-coloured caen stone, chatoyant pieces,
Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige,
Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform,
Making mere faculae of the sun and moon
I study you glout and gloss, but have
No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again
From optik to haptik and like a blind man run
My fingeres over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,
Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveoles,
Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear,
An angle-titch to all your corrugations and coigns,
Hatched foraminous cavo-rilievo of the world,
Deictic, fiducial stones. Chiliad by chiliad
What bricole piled you here, stupendous cairn?
What artist poses the Earth écorché thus,
Pillar of creation engouled in me?
What eburnation augments you with men’s bones,
Every energumen an Endymion yet?
All the other stones are in this haecceity it seems,
But where is the Christophanic rock that moved?
What Cabirian song from this catasta comes?from Hugh MacDiarmid, “On a Raised Beach,” in The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, Volume One (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), 422-23.
“It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life.”
This is conversion. This is what it is to believe in the gospel.
What makes a Christian a Christian is “being caught up into the messianic sufferings of God in Jesus Christ.”
But here we strike bottom too. Here we are at the very heart of things. The cup of humanity’s maturity must be drunk to the dregs. The correct response to modernity is not to place God beyond the limits of reason, or drag him into history from the outside, or domesticate him in “religious sentiment,” or bottle him up in bourgeois mentality by making belief in him a human excellence. Nor again is it the answer to assert that to move away from his is the destruction of the root of all human culture. Nor, finally is the answer to make of him the object of a free personal decision.
God in Christ is a God suffering, and to share in his weakness is to believe in him. This is what it means to be a Christian.
Gustavo Gutierrez, “The Limitations of Modern Theology: On a Letter of Bonhoeffer,” in James B. Nickoloff, ed., Gustavo Gutierrez: Essential Writings (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 39.
Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos by Eric J. Chaisson
A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey
My System: 21st Century Edition by Aron Nimzowitsch
Their Morals and Ours by Leon Trotsky
