Bully’s Blog

“Adam himself was to bring both death and life into the world through wise judgment.”

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The view that the death and resurrection of Christ purchased back for us the innocence (and innocent world) of Genesis 1 seems extremely childish to me now. How did we miss the fact that the Old Testament is filled to overflow with deaths and resurrections, personal, familial, national and imperial? There was no death before sin, but the scenario deliberately set up by God in Genesis was to bring Adam to a point of making a wise judgment. He was to crush the head of the serpent. In a sense, he was to kill death. His obedience would guarantee future life, but his obedience itself was a form of death. Obeying God is a daily dying, but as Paul understood, it was a dying so that there might be rejoicing on the other side. Obedience is a death that makes a judgment call to purchase, nay, miraculously create, new life. The original creation was set up, wound up, to go somewhere better, to be something greater.

Peter Leithart gave some lectures on the writings of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy in 2008: Continue reading

or Being a Truly Impure Thinker

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” John 14:15

Peter Leithart wrote this week:

How do we know things? Experimentation, deduction, observation?

In Genesis, knowledge is first associated with two things – with food and with sex. There is a tree of the knowledge of good and evil, whose fruit opens the eyes of Adam and Eve so that they perceive that they are naked. Then Adam knows his wife and she conceives Cain.

If we want a strictly biblical answer: Knowledge is eating. Knowledge is sex.

Continue reading

or The Knowledge of Good and Evil is Always a Two-Edged Sword

 

“Nobody has the power to bless or be blessed who has lost the vigor to curse. Our society is so polite that it cannot curse social evils and prefers to blaspheme God instead.”
- Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

Judgment is not destruction. Judgment is assessment. For every beast rejected and sent to outer darkness, there is a redeemed beast that ascends to God. AD70 was the ultimate Yom Kippur, the outworking of the cross. Passover always leads to the Day of Atonement, the Day of the Lord when the flaming sword turns to and fro.