Bully's Blog

“Matthew understands Jesus to be the rightful heir of the chieftaincy who instead volunteers to become the Victim at the tribe’s feast. But by being the voluntary victim, he becomes the first victim in the world who can speak.”

An excerpt from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s “Fruit of Lips”:

“…as oral as Peter the fisherman must have been and as much as he probably detested ink, Matthew certainly was familiar with paper work and written records, only too well. Since we do not expect him to be employed inside his old activities, where he had used writing for superficial purposes to say the least, we may expect him to fight elsewhere…”

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or A Ripsnorter Ritual

Ritual is powerful stuff. Much of modern evangelicalism prides itself in rejecting liturgy and being “open to the Spirit,” and then turns this “openness” into an uninspired (and very uninspiring) human formula, in place of the inspired Divine one. Instead of following a pattern found in every part of the Bible (worship is literary architecture), we are stuck with either erroneous traditions or off-the-cuff rambles which, although “open to inspiration,” somehow sound exactly the same each week. Human beings love repetition in every area of life, and ritual is a prime method of teaching truth and holiness.

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Luke Welch writes:

Exodus 4 shows us what happens when you take up the staff God has commanded you to take up. It changes from death into rulership: from a snake into a scepter. Let us see how this works out with the command to “take up the cross, and follow me” (Mt 16.24).
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A Guest Post by Chris Oswald, a pastor in the St. Louis, Missouri area

Gospel Proximity: Credo- and Paedobaptism and Pneumatological Signage

In the shadow of a tall bookshelf containing all 144,000 Douglas Wilson books, next to the covenantal family sing-a-long piano which held the covenantal tea set on a covenantal doily, I sat on a covenantal couch trying to explain our credo-baptist position to some dear Christian friends who wished to join our church without getting wet.

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According to a recent post by Steve Jeffery, Paul quotes seven Old Testament texts in Galatians 3:6-16. He notes that they are chiastic, but I reckon they are also Covenant-shaped:

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An excerpt from Jeffrey Meyers’ The Lord’s Service: The Grace of Covenant Renewal Worship, pp. 283-285.

Faith comes from hearing. —Romans 10:7a.

One does not need to read very far into Emily Dickinson’s poetry to discover that her verse often captures the quintessential American religious consciousness. Consider these lines from three of Emily Dickinson’s poems:
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Final excerpt from the early pages of A. T. Ross’ Hebrews commentary. Part 1 here.

Temple and Typology

The evidence that Hebrews was written before the fall of Jerusalem in A. D. 70 is strengthened by a few other observations. Timothy is said to be alive (13:23), and while it cannot be certainly determined that this is the same Timothy that traveled with Paul, there exists no good reason not to think it is the same Timothy to whom Paul wrote two epistles.

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[Today and tomorrow I'm posting a couple of excerpts from the draft of a forthcoming book-length commentary by A. T. Ross, The Messianic Priest-King: An Exposition of the Book of Hebrews. His goal has been to take an approach to Hebrews similar to David Chilton's concerning the book of Revelation, "paying close attention to the symbolic dimension and how the intertextual uses of the Old Testament impacted the argument." Dealing with the chiastic structures and typology, and quoting all the best guys, Adam has really done his homework. I'll keep you posted on publication.]

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