Still More Books…

…I don’t have time to read…

Bach among the Theologians, Jaroslav Pelikan
A D Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker

Music Theory that I Don’t Understand…

     Inspired by my friend J Random Hermeneut, I give you the Neapolitan Sixth.  Figuring this out has led me to review just what the major and minor scales are, as well as how to define an inversion, something I never grasped even while playing saxophone all those many, many years ago.
     Yes, that’s right, your humble narrator played the saxophone, as well as the clarinet.  It was a good way to meet girls…  Well, it’s something I’d like to take up again some time this year.  We’ll be swingin’ with Bach and Coltrane by the end of the decade, you just listen.
     Peace out.

A Happy Conclusion

     Seems that the good J S Bangs and I agreed with each other without my realizing it.  Of course, this conclusion isn’t happy because he agrees with me and thus allows me to say I was right – something I love to do, by the way - but because we simply agree with one another in this at least, the kind of agreement that comes as a gift to both of us and has nothing to do with persuasion and debate.  In light of that gift, we needn’t rend ourselves arguing about Jesus.  Of course, there are likely other points of contention, but I’m always glad to come away with a greater sense of mutual understanding and agreement than I am with a sense of victory or defeat in forensic combat.
     Really, it’s true.  At least it is on even Thursdays in Spring.
     Why are you looking at me like that? 

Just for the record…

     Mark Steyn is right.

A Clarification…

     I’m not really a supralapsarian for the simple reason that it is an explanation for that which cannot be explained.  Why are we comprehended in this mass of sin and death?  Who knows?  I sure don’t.  Saying that God ‘consigned all to disobedience’ etc doesn’t so much explain the origin of sin and death as tell how the purely good God of all has used sin and death for his own purely good ends.  So, while I’m sympathetic towards the supralapsarian strain, inasmuch as it reflects biblical seriousness and a desire to look unflinchingly at sin and death while not letting thought drift aimlessly into the morass of Jesus as Cosmic Second Thought, I must refuse to give my full assent. 
     There.  I knew you all were dying to hear that.  Peace out.

Logos asarkos?

     In the twentieth century, some folks got around to denying that there ever was a Logos asarkos, that is to say, an ‘unincarnate’ Son.  Some were boldly incoherent enough to say Hell no! the preexistent Son is in fact Jesus in the Flesh…*
     Well, it may seem that we here at COG have loped into that error, what with all our talk of Jesus being the reason for all things.  But rest easy good readers, we have not.  Note well, however, that the Logos asarkos, the Son in his eternity, must always be identified as the Logos incarnandus, the One Who Was To Be Incarnate. 
     As I’ve belabored and will belabor ’till I drop, the Son’s coming into this world as the man Jesus is the first principle, the reason for all things, the point and significance of all creation, from quasars and Goldilocks planets to platapi and paramecia. 
     So, I just can’t think of the Son as he is found, say, in the theophanies of the Old Testament, and not think of him as the Son who was to be incarnate [by our reckoning of time and verbal tenses].  Still, let there be no doubt – Jesus was not floating about in eternity in some ‘child-man’ phase, waiting to be somehow ‘implanted’ in the Virgin Mary.  He really was ’conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, and born of the Virgin Mary’; he did in fact ‘become man’ through this Spirit-wrought, virginal conception, taking on the flesh of sinful humanity ['in the likeness of sinful flesh', don't you know] and sanctifying that flesh in the doing.  

*Contrary to what they teach in kindergartens nowadays, Karl Barth was not one of them.

Not a Problem – A Reply to J S Bangs

     I have no soteriological problem.  Not only humanity, but all of creation is healed through Christ’s crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and ascension.  I thought this was obvious from the rather haphazardly chosen declarations from Colossians, which are echoed not only throughout Paul’s letters, but are found all over the apostolic writings. 
     What’s more, this follows from a simple premise at the heart of the apostolic writings and elaborated by the likes of Ignatius of Antioch and Irenaeus and on and on and on:  Jesus is the ‘hypothesis’ of creation itself, the reason there is anything at all – he is first and last, before all things…  He didn’t come simply for a rescue operation, but his coming is the reason all things, seen and unseen, exist in the first place.  So, his coming in the flesh of a weird creature inhabiting a rather curiously small planet in a small solar system tucked away in the arm of a spiral galaxy is not contingent on the fall of humanity into sin; the existence of that galaxy and all things is contingent on the coming of the Son in the flesh of a weird creature…etc.  What’s more, the Son is the mediator of creation itself, as all things are ‘for him, through him, in him’, and all things ‘hold together’ in him.  You simply cannot conceive of the existence of, well, being of any kind, without him. 
     Now, given that his mission as the incarnate Son is to go to the cross ‘for the life of the world’, this might lead one to a supralapsarian notion of the Fall.  Well, I remain silent at this time on such matters.  Suffice it to say, with Paul, that God ‘consigned all to disobedience so that he might have mercy on all’.
     In any case, for now let’s just remember that the mission of Jesus is not exhausted in the atonement for sin.  Perhaps it’s better to say that Jesus, in dying for the expiation of sin, was in that way making all things new, a newness to be consummated at his return when all the Old will finally be burned away, revealing the new heaven and the new earth.  So – all creation is comprehended in his death and resurrection and ascension, and though we are indeed the center of action, this does not restrict Jesus’ salvific, healing, work to humans.  With that I leave you, my friends, to further ponder the relations between creation and redemption, eschatology and protology, in the hopes of making this more coherent in the as time goes by…
     Peace out.

     Chris Johnson has found the motherload of prog smugness.  Yes, my friends, Matthew 28.18 must be a typo.  Either that or some androcentric, womyn-hating manthing interpolated it.  It also seems I’m just a backward hick.  You see, dear reader, I actually believe - in the 21st century no less! – that ‘the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross requires that Jesus be God-in-the-flesh’.  Lord help me…

Is this a Luxury Bandwagon?

     Well, I’m about the gazillionth blogger to note that we’ve stumbled upon a delightful garden world that our intrepid scientists have dubbed Gliese 581 C after its most famous of stars, Gliese 581.  This planet is at the ‘Goldilocks distance’ from its own sun.  That is, it’s neither too hot, nor too cold, but just right – water won’t freeze all over its surface at all times, nor will it vaporize off its entire surface at all times.  Of course, the thing is fifty percent bigger than earth and apparently much denser than our humble abode to boot, so who knows what kind of life if any such a rock might foster.  After all, density has an effect on the force of gravity at the surface of a planet, and that force of gravity in turn affects the likelihood of life larger than a bacterium or a self-flagellating paramecium.
     In any case, this is being heralded as an astonishing discovery, but for the wrong reasons.  I mean, there is as yet no evidence of anything we might call ‘life’, as though we could be certain just what constitutes ‘life’ at a far corner of some far-flung arm of a spiral galaxy.  No, it’s just cool to find all these planets – as John H notes, we have come across 229 new extrasolar planets in about fifteen years.  That’s just good fun. 
     Still, we seem obsessed with life ‘out there’, and I agree with John H that we Christians might want to give some thought to this poser, because Dawkins and his gang sure as hell have.
     So let’s give it some thought.
     I can’t say that it bothers me overmuch.  As I said already, there seems no reason to get hot and excited over the possibility of ‘life’ out there since we have yet to find definitive evidence despite all our searching and all the hype over each supposedly apocalyptic discovery.  [As an aside - just what we hope to find is, to me at least, as telling as the hope itself.]  Anyway, if there is something alive out there, then, hey, the Father created it through the Son in the Holy Spirit, and that’s that.  If, mirabile dictu, it happens to be ‘intelligent’ – like a dolphin, perhaps, or a precocious MBA student with extraterrestrial Blue-Tooth – then, hey, same deal. 
     What we mustn’t do is head down the path of ‘multiple incarnations’ of the Second Person, or Cosmic Christ, or whatever.  Jesus is and will always be a man, and a Jewish man at that.  IF there are weird and wily civilizations out there, then he died to save ‘em, just like us.  As for the scandal that gives, too bad.  It only increases in scope; it doesn’t change in kind.  After all, most folks despise a savior born into a tribal people suppressed in an imperial backwater at a most unglamorous time in history.  That he came to get himself killed as a criminal of no account outside the gates of the City Supposedly At The Center Of The Earth only makes it more unbearably offensive. 
     So, our claim that Jesus is the ‘image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation’; that he is the one ‘in whom and for whom and through whom all things were made’; that in him ‘all things hold together’; and that by his stripes we, and all creation, are healed – as Gregory of Nazianzus said, one drop of blood heals the whole cosmos; well, those will just have to stay.  The fact that this all means that we puny humans, with our susceptibility to viruses the size of a few microns and our penchant for self-destruction, are somehow the main event inasmuch as we are patterned after Jesus, well, that’s fine by me.  Now, if folks out there are, you know, humanoid, then, well, that’s a neat kettle of sawdust…    

Marketing

     Idea for a T-shirt: 
     Property of the Transcendental Signified.