A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Judaism

  • Was St. Paul a Christian?

    Pamela Eisenbaum’s Paul Was Not a Christian (thanks to Matt Frost for the recommendation) makes a nice companion volume to Amy-Jill Levine’s The Misunderstood Jew. Like Levine, Eisenbaum is a practicing Jew who studies Christian origins and thus brings an important and distinctive perspective to bear on the subject. In some ways, Eisenbaum has the Read more

  • Jesus’s Jewish parables

    I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it here on the blog, but I’ve recommended Amy-Jill Levine’s The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus to a number of people. In fact, I consider it almost a must-read for any Christian given how saturated our tradition is with anti-Judaism. I’d recommend Read more

  • Maimonides on the Messiah

    I’ve been reading a (heavily abridged) edition of Moses Maimonides’ (1138-1204) systematic digest and commentary on the Jewish law, Mishneh Torah, and found his discussion of the Messiah toward the end of particular interest. The Messiah, he says, is not some kind of supernatural figure, but simply a righteous king in the line of David Read more

  • The survival of chaos after the victory of God

    Jon D. Levenson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence is one of the most stimulating theology books I’ve read in a long time. I was expecting something different–a theodicy of sorts; but what I got instead was more interesting. Levenson argues that key passages in the Tanakh/Jewish Bible present Read more

  • Should Jews view Christianity as a new revelation?

    Over the past several decades Christians have been rethinking their relationship to Jews and Judaism. This has been prompted, most obviously, by the horrors of the Holocaust and the recognition that centuries of Christian anti-Judaism and persecution of Jews helped lay the groundwork for it. Most notably, both the Catholic Church and most mainline Protestant Read more

  • What happens when we pray the Psalms?

    According to Walter Brueggemann, in his essay “The Counter-World of the Psalms,”* the Psalms mediate to us a “counter-world” that subverts our “closely held world”–that is, the narrative or worldview we commonly live by. What is this “closely held” world like? For Brueggemann, it is a picture of the world characterized by anxiety and scarcity, Read more

  • Keep the Bible weird!

    Peter Enns recounts a conversation he had with a Jewish colleague in graduate school about the story of Adam and Eve: So my classmate and I were having lunch talking about this story and I mentioned casually the “fall” of humanity. “The what?” “The fall of humanity. You know, Adam and Eve’s sin plunged all Read more

  • Heschel’s trilemma

    Reading 20th-century Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel’s important work God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism recently, I was struck by this passage: There are only three ways of judging the prophets: they told the truth, deliberately invented a tale, or were victims of an illusion. In other words, revelation is either a Read more

  • Was Jesus married? Does it matter?

    It looks like there’s some skepticism among scholars about the authenticity of the already much-discussed “Jesus’ wife” papyrus–said to be a fragment from a non-canonical Coptic gospel that has Jesus referring to “my wife” and saying that she will be a “disciple.” Much of yesterday’s breathless reporting on the papyrus centered around its potential to Read more

  • What does it mean to ask whether Christians and Muslims worship “the same God”?

    Occasionally controversy arises as to whether Christians and Muslims worship “the same God.” (See here for an example.) I don’t find this to be a particularly helpful way of putting the issue: presumably there is, at most, one God, so asking whether two groups of people worship the “same God” must be shorthand for something Read more