Month: February 2006

At least according to this funny post on what your drink says about you (via Dappled Things).

In thinking about how non-Christians might be saved without compromising the claim that Jesus is the unique agent of salvation, I wonder if it might be helpful to think about the different ways in which we can be said to know someone. I can know someone in virtue of having met them and engaged in personal interaction with them, or I can know things about someone (e.g. by reading books about them, having them described to me, or under a particular title like “The Queen of England”). This is similar to, though probably not the same as, Bertrand Russell’s distinction between knowledge by acqaintance and knowledge by description.

Applied to the question of salvation, maybe we can say that it’s possible to become acquainted with Jesus and respond to him in an appropriate way, without encountering him under the same description as Christians would use. This could take place in the context of other religions, but might not necessarily have to. Though it would be difficult, if not impossible, to specify exactly which events would count as such encounters, which is why this kind of speculation should not be taken to be a substitute for Christians sharing the gospel.

Just some thoughts – even less well thought out than the usual fare here.

It should be remembered that truth does not vary according to persons; when a human being says something true he is invincible, irrespective of the one with whom he may be disputing. – St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Job

(from this article via Kevin Jones)

Andrew Bacevich on President Bush’s “isolationist” canard in the SOTU. As Bacevich correctly points out, no political figure of any importance in the U.S. today could be accurately labeled an isolationist (more’s the pity, some might say).

Isolationism survives in contemporary American political discourse because it retains utility as a cheap device employed to impose discipline. Think of it as akin to red-baiting — conjuring up bogus fears to enforce conformity in the realm of foreign policy. In that regard, the beleaguered Bush, his standing in public opinion polls tumbling, is by no means the first president to sound the alarm about supposed isolationists subverting American statecraft.

Even those who, for a variety of reasons, favor a less interventionist U.S. foreign policy are hardly ever “isolationist” in the sense of wanting any kind of U.S. withdrawal from the rest of the world. On occasion you get someone like Pat Buchanan who is broadly non-interventionist and favors protectionism and stricter controls on immigration, but he’s a comparative rarity with virtually no following or significant influence (though the magazine he helped found frequently runs articles of interest). In any event, surely the greater danger right now is an excessive confidence, among virtually the entirety of our political elite, in the U.S.A.’s ability to solve the world’s problems, “end tyranny,” etc.

In his book The Glass of Vision Anglican theologian Austin Farrer attempts to develop a theory of the inspiration of Scripture that avoids verbal inerrancy on the one hand and, on the other, a view that sees the Scriptures as nothing more than the human witness to God’s revelatory acts. He points out, correctly I think, that the events by themselves are not revelatory, but have to be interpreted correctly. Taken simply as events, the unjust execution of an itinerant rabbi and his subsequent reappearance are not, at least obviously, to be described as God’s acts of ultimate redemption.

So, Farrer reasons, the Apostolic interpretation of those events is as intergral a part of revelation as the events themselves, and we should think of the interpretation of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection given to us in the New Testament as inspired.* However, in order to avoid inerrancy, which he thinks is untenable, he doesn’t want to say that the very words are inspired. Instead he says that the New Testament (and, presumably the OT, but he doesn’t discuss that here) contains inspired images that interpret God’s revelatory activity. The kinds of images he has in mind are the image of the Kingdom of God, Jesus as the Son of Man, the death-as-sacrifice-and-communion image that we get in the Last Supper narratives, the image of the Trinity in Revelation, etc.

Farrer says that thinking in terms of images should make us cautious about drawing hasty inferences from biblical passages. The Bible is not a textbook of systematic theology, and images function differently than propositions. So we should not be quick to deduce doctines from these images but should meditate on the Scriptures so that we come to dwell in them and they become the prisms through which we experience God and the world.

While I’m sympathetic to a lot of what Farrer says here, I wonder if the distinction between words and images is really sustainable. Can we so easily separate, for instance, a poet’s words from the imagery she uses? It seems to me that images are conditioned by the words that are used to express them. So I’m not convinced that Farrer can get away from the idea that the words themselves are inspired in some sense.
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*Farrer emphasizes, though, that Jesus’ own self-interpretation is, for Christian faith, consistent with the Apostolic understanding of his person and work. This is true even though we wouldn’t be able to deduce the developed understanding from the traces of Jesus’ self-understanding that we have in the Gospels.

or does Kahled Mashaal of Hamas

look a lot like screen heartthrob George Clooney?

And could this be the real reason for Hamas’ popularity with the ladies?