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faith as the progression from OC badges to NC badges) that he is still TOO evangelical/Baptistic. Where is the declaration of justification heard? It is an event rather than simply a statement (I like that), and the event is baptism (I like that too). BUT, is he then saying that BAPTISM is not about entry?? Is he saying that baptism is a statement about what has already happened (ie, baptism/justification is distinguished [but how?] from and subsequent to [but how?] call/becoming a Christian)?

6) This confusion, if it is his and not mine, does raise questions about his views in relation to classic Lutheran-Catholic problematics. That doesn't decide the truth of his position, but it does give his critics something to work with. I think he's well within the Reformed camp with this, since people like Murray also place calling logically prior to justification in the ordo. For a Lutheran, however, this just brings back medieval confusions over justification and sanctification. Justification, Lutherans will say, is for NTW a declaration pronounced over a person who has begun (however briefly and imperfectly) to live the new life of the Spirit, over the person who has been called; it is not pronounced over a person who is still in his sins. Perhaps the opposition from Reformed writers is a sign that they are operating in a Lutheran mode here (as in their treatment of law-gospel). Peter Peter 9:31:00 PM 107345347679333692 Steiner notes that, following the Renaissance, European drama operated under the shadows of neo-classical and Elizabethan dramatic practice, the former "closed" and rigidly adhering to Aristotelian criteria, the other open and experimental. He discusses the theory of Thomas Rymer (a neo-classicist) at some length, concluding that the controversies that Rymer expounded upon in the seventeenth century have haunted drama ever since. Rymer's theory, however, rests on equivocation. On the one hand, he contrasts Greek drama and Shakespearean in terms of a contrast of deliberate art v. natural effusion of talent. On the other hand, he argues that classical tragedies are realistic and Shakespearean plays are fantastic. Classical tragedy is both artificial and realistic; as Steiner explains, "It is natural to the mind because it imitates life when life is in a condition of extreme order. Its 'rules' or technical conventions are the means of such imitation; order in action can only be reflected by order in art." This is intriguing on two levels: first, because the grand gravity of classical drama is being defended as realistic and reasonable; and second because tragedy is defended (as in the Sourvinou-Inwood quotes above) as the drama of order, a description that simply does not fit the tragedies of Shakespeare.

Rymer also raised the question of how Greek drama could be imitated in a Christian setting, and gave the rather weak answer that the Greeks might "also be improv'd by modern Tragedians, and something thence devis'd suitable to our Faith and Customes." As Steiner notes, Rymer does not recognize that "the underlying conventions of neo-classical tragedy are myths emptied of active belief." The religious and dramatic are intertwined in classical tragedy, but detached by neo-classicists. One wonders if there is a kind of lex credendi/lex orandi relationship here, with beliefs being shaped by the "rites" of dramatic practice.

Then this very stimulating thought: "since the seventeenth century, the history of drama has been inseparable from that of critical theory. It is to demolish an old theory or prove a new one that many of the most famous of modern dramas have been written. No other literary form has been so burdened with conflicts of definition and purpose. The Athenian and the Elizabethan theatre were innocent of theoretical debate. The Poetics are conceived after the fact, and Shakespeare left no manual of style. In the seventeenth century, this innocence and the attendant freedom fo imaginative life were forever lost." He calls Dryden the first modern because of his obsession with dramatic theory and the "dissociation betwen creative and critical value." He might have called him the first post-modern. Peter Peter 12:31:00 PM 107342107171134278 George Steiner in his *Death of Tragedy* describes the "Shakespearean difference" as mainly due to Shakespeare's avoidance of fascination with Hellenic models: "The neo-classic view [which rigidified Aristotelian conceptions of tragedy] expresses a growing perception of the miracle of Greek drama. This perception was fragmentary. There were few translations of Aeschylus, and the plays of Euripides were known mainly in the versions of Seneca. Renaissance scholars failed to realize, moreover, that Aristotle was a practicel critic whose judgements are relevant to Sophocles rather than to the whole of Greek drama (there is no unity of time, for instance, in the Eumenides). Nevertheless, the ideals of Sidney and the ambitions of Ben Jonson convey insight into the fact that the tragic imagination owes to the Greek precedent a debt of recognition. Time and agian, this insight has mastered the sensibility of western poets. Much of poetic drama, from Milton to Goethe, from Holderlin to Cocteau, is an attempt to revive the Greek ideal. It is a great and mysterious stroke of fortune that Shakespeare escaped the fascination of the Hellenic."

A stroke of fortune indeed. But perhaps it is not so mysterious as Steiner makes it out. Perhaps Shakespeare's use of medieval models (which Steiner does recognize) and his clear familiarity with the Bible delivered him from derivative Hellenic drama. Peter Peter 11:47:00 AM 107341844342957505 There's some intriguing cross-fertilization going on between the two sabbath healings in Luke 13-14. In 13, Jesus heals the woman who has been bent double for 18 years, and in ch 14 Jesus heals a man with dropsy. In both, the healing is scrutinized critically by the Pharisees, and Jesus rebukes them by using brief parables drawn from animal husbandry. Both also end with humiliation for the Pharisees: that is explicit in 13:17, and implicit in the silence of 14:6. Anyone who has been shut down by a witty response knows what painful shame that causes.

Those parables make comparison of these two incidents interesting and fruitful. "Dropsy" is an older name for what is now generally called "edema," which is swelling caused by fluid retention that has the perverse effect of making the victim very thirsty, which, of course, only makes his condition worse. Jesus heals the man, and this means that he slakes his thirst, for Jesus is the living water. But the parable he tells to defend his healing on the sabbath doesn't fit this healing, or at least it doesn't fit it as well as the parable he tells in ch 13. When he heals the woman, he tells the Pharisees that they too would "untie his ox or his donkey from the stall and lead him away to water" on the sabbath (13:15), but when he heals the man with dropsy, he asks whether the Pharisees would rescue a man or animal from a pit on the sabbath (14:5). The parable in 13 seems to go better with the healing in 14, and the parable in 14, with its implicit references to death and resurrection, seems more appropriate to the miracle in 13 (which describes the woman as "rebuilt," used also of the Davidic tabernacle in Acts 15:16). This suggests that the two healings function as mutually interpreting companions. The interpretive payoff is that the parable in 14 explains the depth of the miracle in ch 13: the woman who is bent double has come up out of the ground like a man fallen down a well.

One last thought: In 14:5 Jesus makes the curious reference to a "son" who falls into a "well" (or pit, cistern). Practically, of course, he's pointing out that no one would wait until after the Sabbath to rescue a on in that condition. But oddness of the picture gives pause. Several things come to mind: Joseph is a son who is put down into a pit by envious brothers (Gen 37), and is brought out not to enjoy rest but to be sold into slavery. Jeremiah too is put down into a pit and drawn back up, and in the next chapter Jerusalem falls and Judah is taken away into captivity (Jer 38-39). In both cases, apparently, the man rescued from the pit is a foreshadowing of the eventual rescue of Israel from the pit of captivity, their eventual resurrection and restoration to sabbath prosperity in the land. So, with this in the background, Jesus' little parable symbolizes His entire ministry: He has come to bring Sabbath, that is, He has come to draw out Yahweh's son from the pit, to draw out the ox of the priestly people from the well of exile. Jesus, of course, fulfills this in His going into the earth and His return from under the earth.

Also, in both the story of Joseph and that of Jeremiah the text makes it clear that there is no water in the pit. Being drawn out of the pit is thus connected with receiving refreshment and slaking thirst. So perhaps the parable of the rescued son is more appropriate to a man being healed of dropsy than it first appeared to be. Along these lines, it is intriguing that the Father does not rescue His Son from the pit on the sabbath day, but waits until the day after the sabbath. What's up with that, then? Peter Peter 8:02:00 AM 107340494029249930 Monday, January 05, 2004 Another insight from Sourvinou-Inwood: After offering a reconstruction of the development of tragedy from the hymns of the TRAGODOI through "prototragedy" (which introduced mimetic elements), she gives a brief review of the development of comedy. At the end, she contrasts the two both as regards their ritual contexts and their respective presentation of the gods: "while tragedy arose in the context of the establishment of order that began with the XENISMOS of Dionysos, and was completed with the processions and sacrifices that followed it, comedy emerged in the context of ritual dissolution, abnormality, and reversals. The different ritual contexts of the two genres account, I suggest, for some of their differences." With regard to theology proper: The gods in tragedy are "representations, almost impersonations, of the real gods" and therefore "the gods in tragedy are not only not mocked, but not, ultimately, 'criticized'; polis religion is not 'challenged.' The world is problematized in tragedy, and the human condition, and so religious issues, are explored, and the darkness of the cosmos acknowledged." By contrast, the gods in comedy (eg, *Frogs*) are insulted and mocked. Sourvinou-Inwood offers two contextual features that help to explain this: "First, the metatheatricality of comedy entails that the gods in comedy were perceived as comic constructs, rather than representations of the real gods; their identity as comic constructs was constantly foregrounded through the metatheatricality of the genre." By the "metatheatrical" nature of comedy, she means that comedy mocks the conventions of tragic drama, it is a drama that serves as a criticism of drama; it is not MIMESIS of life but a drama about drama itself, a MIMESIS of a MIMESIS. (Think "Space Balls," for example, or any movie by Mel Brooks.) "Second, the reason why they were mocked may be the result of comedy having been generated in a ritual context of an abnormal reversed world with the parameters of the reversed world continuing to affect the genre and its development even when it became removed from the KOMOS context."

Now, if Sourvinou-Inwood is correct, something quite remarkable goes on in the history of comedy and tragedy. They don't just intersect, but they seem to cross each other and change places. For Shakespeare, COMEDY is the genre of restored order; *Midsummer Night's Dream* begins in chaos and frustration -- interestingly allied to a pseudo-order of Draconian law and paternal tyranny -- and moves through a carnivalesque confusion TOWARD order. Some of Shakespeare's tragedies work this way too (*Macbeth* ends with a wood marching in to take Scotland captive to spring and joy). But there are also tragedies (*Lear,* of course) where there is no final resolution, no happy ending. I suppose that a case could be made that Aristophanes also moves us toward a new order of sorts: Birds wrest control of the cosmos from the gods. But Sourvinou-Inwood says that for the Greeks tragedy is the genre that re-enacts the establishment of civic order, not comedy. This bears more investigation.

Another notion suggests itself in Sourvinou-Inwood's analysis: That tragedy is the genre of restored order precisely because it is connected with sacrifice (Girard playing heavily in the background). Pentheus is dismembered by devotees of Dionysus (including Agave, Pentheus's own mother), and that dismemberment, however shocking and sad (not least to Agave), brings a troubled city to rest. Now: Is there a similar kind of sacrificial dynamic in Shakespearean comedy? Who is the scapegoat whose rejection restores order in the Athens of *Dream*? Bottom? What brings *Twelfth Night* to comic resolution -- the expulsion of Malvolio? These suggestions don't seem to work. Rather, Shakespearean comedy seems to bring renewed order WITHOUT sacrifice. Or, if there is a sacrifice, it is a self-sacrifice, rather than sacrifice a scapegoat (a TRAGOS!). HERO, not the cad Claudio, "dies to live" so as to "prolong" her wedding day. And Hero is utterly and completely innocent, truly a "maid." Peter Peter 9:35:00 PM 107336732205670483 Discussing the religious origins of Athenian tragedy in her recent *Tragedy and Athenian Religion,* Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood first examines the early forms of the festival of the City Dionysia. She points out that "tragedy" comes from "tragos," a male goat, and that the first hints of tragedy arise in the hymns that accompanied the sacrifice of a goat at the City Dionysia. At the center of the whole festival performance was the welcome of Dionysus (symbolized by a procession of phallic symbols) to the city center, but this welcome was preceded by resistance to Dionysus, as it was in many myths (cf. Pentheus in Euripides' *The Bacchae*). Dionysus was seen as a dangerous god, especially by those who held power; the coming of Dionysus meant disorder and the loss self- and civic control. Paradoxically, though, order was established not by resisting the god but by welcoming him, for Dionysus was, as Sourvinou-Inwood puts it in a nice phrase, "the teacher of controlling the loss of control." This applied to both sexual activity and the use of wine. Dionysus brought wine, and if one resisted, he would lose control; if one accepted and submitted to the god of wine, then the disorder of wine could be ordered. Men could learn to stay upright (ORTHOS) if they submitted to the god. Likewise, according to the myths, anyone who resisted the sexual disorder of Dionysus would lose sexual control and fertility; but those who submitted to the god could control the loss of control. They would be able to remain sexually upright (ORTHOS), that is, erect. (Sourvinou-Inwood points out that "ORTHOS" is sometimes used to describe a phallus held upright during a Dionysian festival.)

Originating in this matrix, with these issues in play, tragedy arises as a mode of religious exploration, particularly as a mode of exploring the paradoxes of order and disorder, and the unknowable and uncontrollable character of the gods. It should also be said that this account makes it clear that mythical, dramatic, and political issues are all in play at the origins of tragedy. Peter Peter 3:55:00 PM 107334693034766469 Sunday, January 04, 2004 Also in the Nov 2003 IJST is the first installment of Robert Jenson's Maurice Lectures (University of London), entitled "Christ as Culture." Among other things, Jenson criticizes HR Niebuhr's framing of the issue as "Christ and culture" by noting that "Christ" (Messiah) is meaningful within an already-existing culture, that of Israel, so that all questions of Christianity and culture are questions about the relationship between two cultures; insists that the church is herself a culture, and pushes that a step further by saying that Christ as totus Christus is also a culture; raises questions about the concrete implications of saying that the church is the continuation of the culture of Israel (eg., "Are we permitted simply to skip over Leviticus?"); claims that Christ is not only culture but also polity, and traces the history of Israel's polity as a history of Christ; argues that part of the proclamation of Christ's sovereignty over the polities of the world is the claim that WE in Christ are also sovereign over these polities; endorses Bellarmine's claim that the church is "as visible as the republic of Venice"; and draws the necessary inference that the church, being a polity in this world, is necessarily in conflict with all other polities. All that and more in a few pages of Jenson's characteristically evocative (and sometimes maddeningly vague) prose. Peter Peter 9:46:00 PM 107328157998224626 Nicholas Healy has a useful article on the notion of "practice" in recent ecclesiology in the Nov 2003 issue of the International Journal of Systematic Theology. He begins by distinguishing two trends within recent ecclesiology, both of which focus on the church's practices. The first, which he associates with Kathryn Tanner's *Theories of Culture* is concerned to "bring to discourse" the practices of the church or to examine things that churches and congregations take for granted so that they can be evaluated and critiqued according to their conformity with the word of God. This branch examines the church's practices as part of a program of semper reformanda. The second, which he associated with Lindbeck, Hauerwas, and Milbank, encourages the recovery of traditional ecclesial practices as a means for addressing the problematics of contemporary secular culture. Traditional church practices are seen as adequate to the task, provided that they are retrieved from distortion. This often takes the form of a strong "counter-cultural" ecclesiology.

Healy leaves the first trend to the side and focuses on the second. He criticizes a number of recent theologians and theologies for their inadequate attention to the actual practices of actual churches and their tendency to theologize about "ideal" practices. This is, of course, something of an irony, since the whole point of emphasizing practice is to concentrate on the concrete and particular in ecclesial life. Healy makes several points against this tendency. First, he points out that for many "loosely structured" practices the diversity of specific forms and modes is so great that it is difficult to see how they constitute practices in any meaningful sense. Healy uses the example of "hospitality," which can take many forms and in each of these forms involves all sorts of particular decisions (what kind of greeting gesture is appropriate? what food should be offered? what are the seating arrangements?) and which does not really constitute a practice so much as obedience to a Christian precept.

Second, Healy points to the inadequate attention paid to intention in recent ecclesiology. Practices, he admits, can be formative of character, but an external act or rite can be performed for various reasons, some of which are very bad reasons. Someone may, he suggests, go through a particular Christian gesture superstitiously throughout his entier life, and as a result this gesture would not be forming Christian habits or character but the opposite. Along these lines, Healy notes that many actions are done with a variety of sometimes conflicting intentions, some of which may run contrary to the stated purpose of the practice. In sum, "practices as concretely performed are not patterns of behavior with sufficiently fixed meanings that they can do the task required of them by this version of the new ecclesiologies. Repeated performance of behavior patterns does not, of itself, issue in the right formation of church members nor the acquisition of Christian virtues. Character is indeed formed through practices, but only as they are performed with appropriate intentions and construals. Without such, practices may foster as much as halt the decline of the center and the absorption of the church into the world." In traditional Protestant terms, Sacraments are nothing without the Word.

Healy goes on to examine the work of Reinhold Hutter and Stanley Hauerwas, and ends with a recommendation that Aquinas provides some of the materials for a more satisfactory account of practices. Peter Peter 9:34:00 PM 107328085144184810 Eucharistic meditation, January 4:

Haggai’s prophecy encourages the people of Israel to devote themselves to building the house of the Lord, in spite of opposition and the hostility of the nations. Among the judgments the Lord brings is a drought which leads to a famine: there is no dew, and therefore there is no grain, wine, or oil.

Though this passage is talking about a literal drought and literal famine, the prophet describes this situation in a sacramentally charged fashion. Even in the OT, a drought of this kind would have literally affected worship: Without grain, oil, and wine, Israel would not be able to sustain her worship, would not be able to keep the lamps of the lampstands burning, supply the showbread for the table, have wine for celebration.

In the NC, the passage has even richer significance. Dew is a symbol of the refreshing and life-giving waters of baptism, the waters that fall from heaven to cause the land to produce fruit. And the products that Haggai lists are sacramental products – grain and oil for bread, wine to delight the heart of man. One thing we learn from Haggai is that when God disciplines His people, He brings not only a famine of the word, but also a famine of sacraments – a dearth of water, an empty table.

But that is not what we have. The waters of heaven have been poured on you. And we do not come to an empty table, but to a feast of bread and wine. This can only mean that the curse is lifted, that He does not hold our sins against us, that He has not withheld the dew of heaven, the grain, new wine and oil.
Peter Peter 8:09:00 AM 107323257014047423 Exhortation for January 4:

Sexual immorality has marked all non-Christian civilizations. Leviticus 18 gives a laundry list of sexual sins – incest, adultery, sodomy, bestiality – and ends with this exhortation: “Do not defile yourselves by any of these things; for by all these the nations which I am casting out before you have become defiled. For the land has become defiled, therefore I have visited its punishment upon it, so that the land has spewed out its inhabitants” (Lev 18:24-25).
One of the many things that Paul shared with non-Christian Jews was revulsion toward the sexual practices of the Greco-Roman world. Paul condemned men who “abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing shameless deeds” (Rom 1). And he was equally severe about other forms of sexual sin: “Do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, no effeminate, nor homosexuals . . . shall inherit the kingdom of God.” And again, “Flee sexual immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body” (1 Cor 6). To pagan Greeks and Romans, One of the most bizarre and inexplicable things about the early Christians was their insistence on sexual purity, their insistence that sex was lawful only within the bounds of heterosexual marriage.

The sexual confusions of ancient Canaan and ancient Greece and Rome are still with us, and are becoming more apparent with each passing year. In late November last year, the highest court in Massachusetts decided by a 4-3 vote that the definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman is irrational. The only possible reason for opposing the extension of marriage to same-sex couples, the court concluded, is “animus” and sheer bigotry.

In an important sense, this ruling is a good thing. The Massachusetts court is far more consistent than other courts. Decades ago, the US formally and officially rejected Christian standards for civil law, and there is little reason to think that marriage needs to be defined in Christian terms. The Massachusetts decision and the coming battles over gay marriage in the courts and legislatures of this country will have the salutary effect of sharpening the antithesis, the opposition, between Christian and non-Christian morality.

But the antithesis will be sharpened only if the church adheres to biblical sexual norms. And that is precisely what has NOT happened. How can we be surprised at the Massachusetts court when a few miles away an open homosexual serves as an Episcopal Bishop? And let’s not only think of the spectacular and public failures of the church. In many smaller and hidden ways Christians fail to keep God’s commandments regarding sex.

How can we be surprised that sodomy is celebrated in our culture when Christians are not sexually pure? With pornography widely available and widely used by Christians; with adultery nearly as common within the church as outside; with premarital and extramarital sex acceptable and tolerated within many churches – is it any wonder that the world is confused? To the extent that we are indulging in sexual sin, we are on the wrong side of the battle over gay marriage and we are aiding and abetting the enemy. The Massachusetts court has helpfully sharpened the antithesis from their end. It’s up to us to sharpen the antithesis on our side.

Over the next few years, there will be many legal and legislative battles over gay marriage, and those battles are important. Far MORE important, however, is repentance on the part of the church. Christian sexual morality became the standard of sexual behavior throughout the Western world because the world eventually followed the church’s standards of sexual purity. The Western world is still following the church’s example today, but the example we set is a very poor one. The world will recover some semblance of sexual sanity only when WE do. Peter Peter 7:58:00 AM 107323190475472916 Saturday, January 03, 2004 Does Paul have to deal with Jews who are confident that they are performing the law rightly, and believe that they have something to boast about before God because of their performance? Yes, of course. He's dealing with Pharisees, of the kind that Jesus satirized in his parable, who boasted before God about his performance of the jots and tittles of the law and who believed that this gave him a standing before God above that of the publican. Unless Jesus was making it up, or unless this kind of Pharisaism disappeared by the time of Paul, Paul must be dealing with this as well.

Is this a key issue in Paul's letters? Yes, in Romans at least. But it is not a key issue for exactly the reason that it has sometimes been thought. Surely Jesus and Paul address this to convict individual Jews of their sin and to urge them to repentance. But there is a bigger issue at stake. It's crucial to Jesus because it's this kind of hypocrisy that is leading Israel to ruin; Matthew 24 follows Matthew 23. It is a key issue in Paul because Israel's impenitent sinfulness puts the salvation of the world at risk, and raises questions about God's own righteousness and faithfulness (see earlier post). Peter Peter 10:26:00 PM 107319758676723489 What are the issues for Paul? To oversimplify, but I hope helpfully: Much traditional treatment of Romans and other letters assumes that Paul is mainly concerned with individual soteriology, while recent Pauline scholarship emphasizes that Paul is concerned about the plight of Israel and the purposes of God among the Gentiles. How to settle a global interpretive question like this? The problem is, both approaches can offer more or less coherent accounts of the letters themselves. So long as the focus is narrowly on the letters themselves, these kinds of debates seem hopeless of resolution. (Perhaps a Kuhnian "paradigm shift" would be applicable; in one paradigm anomalies accumulate until a new paradigm takes its place that explains the anomalies.)

The best way to address this, I think, is to see that Paul was writing out of the conviction that the gospel fulfills OT hope and promise. Whatever Paul means by "gospel" must be the fulfillment of what Isaiah, say, prophesied about. So, the question is, What did Isaiah prophecy about? He prophesied about the demonstration of God's righteousness among the nations through the restoration of Israel, about the restoration of Israel through the suffering of the suffering servant, about return from exile, about a new heavens and a new earth. Paul's gospel is that all these things are taking place in Jesus. Peter Peter 10:04:00 PM 107319628993609081 What is Paul trying to prove in Romans 1:18-3:20? Here are a few, non-exhaustive, suggestions:

1) He is trying to close "every mouth" and demonstrate that "all the world" is "accountable to God," and guilty before Him. It is sometimes said in recent Pauline scholarship that this is not a central thrust in Rom 1-3, but that seems to be belied by the concluding statements of 3:19-20. True, Paul could assume from the OT the universality of human sin. However redundant, it does seem to be a crucial purpose for Paul to establish what should be an axiom. But the rhetoric of the passage indicates that his main purpose in this is to convict the JEWS of guilt before God. That is the main theme of chapter 2, where he charges that the Jews who judge the Gentile world are not for that reason exempt from God's indictment against the "unrighteousness and ungodliness of man." Jews have failed in their performance of the law, and therefore before the righteous Judge, they stand guilty. Gentiles who have been circumcised by the Spirit show up the sinfulness of Israel by fulfilling the law that they do not possess by nature. That, as much as anything, is a bitter indictment of the Jews who possess and boast in their possession of the "embodiment of knowledge and of the truth" in the Torah (2:20).

2) But this is NOT the largest purpose that Paul has in this passage. The indictment of all humanity, Jews and Gentiles, as sinners serves the larger purpose of expounding on the gospel of God's righteousness. The sinfulness of Jews, of Israel, after all, is not merely a matter of "universality of sin." Israel was supposed to be Yahweh's SOLUTION to the problem of sin, and therefore Israel's failure puts a question mark over Yahweh's program. Is God's purpose in history going to fail? Is sin going to be dealt with? Is Babel going to be reversed through the seed of Abraham?

3) #2, in turn, raises questions of theology proper. If God's purpose for the Gentiles and the world through Israel has come to nothing, what does that say about God? Can He be trusted? Is He really committed to doing right in the world, to bringing about righteousness, justice, and peace in His creation? Or is He the kind of God who makes a world and then leaves it to its own sorry devices? Does the Judge of all the earth in fact do right? That is the kind of question Paul is dealing with in 3:1-8.

4) Finally, Paul is setting up for 3:25-26 by expounding on the crucial problem of "wrath." One could say that the whole of 1:18-3:20 is under the shadow of the "wrath of God revealed from heaven," for the entire passage has to do with the "ungodliness and unrighteousness of men" against whom God is wrathful. Wrath, further, is described in 1:18-32 as the CAUSE of the disorder and disorientation of human society. If justice and peace are going to reign, then something has to be done about wrath, which means, of course, that something has to be done about sin. What can be done? Is Torah the solution to wrath? No: because those who received Torah did not keep it, and because no flesh can be justified by the works of the law. Is Israel the solution to wrath? No: Israel is under sin (and therefore under wrath) with the Gentiles. Might God deal with wrath by just giving up, ignoring sin? No: Because that would leave His righteousness in question. Only the God of wrath can deal with wrath. And He has, by displaying Jesus as a "propitiation" in blood. Peter Peter 9:55:00 PM 107319574275352566 This morning, NPR had a report on "Celebrants USA," an organization of "Professional celebrants" that designs and officiates at ceremonies of all kinds. The report was about ceremonies of "downsizing," held when someone loses his or her job because of cuts in the size of a company's workforce. Celebrants USA's website introduces the organization as follows: "Celebrants are Professional Officiants who Create Personal Ceremonies to Honor and Celebrate Life's Milestones: Weddings, Commitments-Gay and Lesbian Ceremonies, Renewals of Vows, Baby Namings, Adoption Ceremonies, Coming-of-Age Ceremonies, Birthdays, Special Achievements, Divorce Ceremonies, Survivor Ceremonies, Rites of Passage, Funerals, Memorials, and Civic and Corporate Ceremonies."

On the one hand, this is all rather comical. On the other, it points to the remarkable resilience (or resurgence) of ceremonial behavior in an anti-ritual culture. And it's another sign of the church's retreat and failure, since most of these rites of transition would one day have been officiated by ministers of the gospel. Peter Peter 10:19:00 AM 107315398858646868 Thursday, January 01, 2004 A potpourri of interesting reviews in Books & Culture:

1) Gerald McDermott reviews several recent evangelical books on Christianity's relation to non-Christian religions. He is critical of attempts (Paul Heim, eg) to root a pluralist or inclusivist view of other religions in the doctrine of the Trinity, and also criticizes the tendency to shift from sin/alientation to knowledge as the crucial problem of humanity. McDermott is also aware, however, that the church's confrontation in mission with non-Christian cultures is always a process of expansion and growth for the church as well.

2) Bruce Ellis Benson reviews Stanislas Breton's *The Word and the Cross.* Breton is among a number of French phenomenologists who have turned toward theological and religious concerns in their philosophical work (Jean-Luc Marion is the best known of these). Breton's book explores the connections of word, folly, and power in Christian faith, starting from Paul's statements on the folly of the cross in 1 Cor. As Benson puts it, Paul's words show that the "logic of the cross transcends BOTH Jerusalem and Athens, both the demand of a sign and the demand of giving reasons." Pushing a rather radical kenotic Christology, Brenton claims that Christ has emptied Himself in a way that is never reversed, so that "Christ's very identity" is "nothing." That is to say, Christ is "nothing" with respect to the "empire of being" of this world; the "idol of power" is thus destroyed. As Benson points out, this is difficult to square with a strong doctrine of resurrection (though Benson suggests some ways Breton might work in an exaltation). And, I would add, I have my doubts that "kenosis" in Phil 2 is specifically about the incarnation anyway.

3) Paul Gutjahr reviews a recent collection of essays on Charles Hodge, emphasizing Hodge's lifetime concern with the connections of theology and science.

4) Irving Hexham reviews a book on modern paganism by Ronald Hutton, which debunks myths of a witch-burning craze in medieval or early modern history, shows that the church frequently protected accused witches against, and shows that modern paganism is just that, modern. "Hutton shows, neopaganism is far more deeply rooted in MODERN culture than most people realize. According to his research, modern paganism began its complex development with the reaction of German romantics to the spiritually barren rationalism of the Enlightenment. From Germany the Romantic vision quickly spread to England, where numerous writers embraced it by idealizing either ancient Greece or the Middle ages in poetry and fiction." In short, it all starts with Goethe. Peter Peter 10:18:00 AM 107298110594828316 -->