Sublime

“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but by blood”—his last words before execution were recorded, and, as has often been noted, they were prophetic. But they were also only partly true. Certain crimes were ceased by the Civil War, but they have not been purged. Not yet. Harpers Ferry is

Archbishop Isidore of Seville, writing an encyclopedia called the Etymologiae that circulated widely in manuscript—as many as a thousand handwritten copies survive—had drawn the world as a circle surrounded by oceans and divided by seas into three bodies of land, Asia, Europe, and Africa, inhabited by the descendants of the three sons of Noah: Shem

when I read the New Testament looking for doctrines of divine transcendence, I do so not believing that I am simply “recovering” the intention of the original human authors.

In the modern world of theology and biblical studies, scholars began believing that they had to establish first the ancient “meaning” of the text and only after that ask what doctrine, theology, or ethics modern Christians should derive from those ancient texts today.

Paul is evangelized by the act of ministry, by a minister sharing in his broken person. Paul must give himself over to the new narrative shape of Christ; he must have faith that this new narrative is the constitution of reality—that indeed from death comes life.

Tarsicius van Bavel, in a lucid digest of Augustine’s teaching on this topic,54 cites Sermon 341 as a focal text: here Augustine says that ‘Christ’ has three meanings, referring to the eternal and pre-existent Word, to the incarnate figure of the redeemer and mediator, and to the ‘whole Christ’, head and body.