Theologia et Vita

  Ussher's reputation has suffered the strange fate of being reduced to a single number. The exact date of creation, October 23, 4004 BC, sits in the margin of old King James Bibles like a punchline waiting for a more enlightened age to arrive and laugh at it, and for two centuries that age obliged. But the man who arrived at that date was Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of all Ireland, a friend of Selden and Camden and Laud (when he could stomach Laud, which was not often), and by most accounts the finest biblical chronologist Europe produced. Born in Dublin in 1581 to a family of some standing, he entered Trinity College Dublin at thirteen, which sounds precocious until you remember the institution was barely two years old itself and still finding its feet. He stayed associated with Trinity for most of his life, eventually as vice-chancellor, and the library he helped build there became one of the great theological collections of the British Isles. The chronology for which he's...

The word "race," applied to human beings as a biological taxonomy, comes to us largely through François Bernier, a French physician who published a 1684 classification of humanity into four or five distinct types based on physical appearance. The church did not produce this framework. Scripture certainly did not produce it. A traveling doctor sorting people by complexion produced it, and the colonial enterprise found it enormously useful, and it spread. That history matters because Christians sometimes speak as though racial categories are simply there, given in the nature of things, when they are a relatively recent intellectual invention that served specific political and economic functions. Genesis knows nations and languages and families. It does not know races. What the Bible does know is that every human being descends from Adam and Eve, which is a theological claim about solidarity before it is anything else. Acts 17:26 puts it with unusual directness: from...

  The parable of the wheat and tares (Matt 13:24–30, 36–43) appears only in Matthew and sits just a few verses after the parable of the four soils in the same discourse on the shore of Galilee, which I posted about recently. The two parables are frequently read together, and there is good reason for that; both deal with the response to the word of the kingdom, but they address different questions. The soils parable asks about the receptivity of individuals. This one asks about the visible community that the kingdom creates in the world and what God is doing with its mixed character. The Greek word rendered tares or weeds is zizania , which refers almost certainly to Lolium temulentum , darnel, a weed so closely related to wheat in its early stages that Palestinian farmers called it "false wheat." The two plants are genuinely indistinguishable until the grain head begins to form, at which point the darnel is visible by its smaller, darker seed. This agricultural specificity is...

The Gnostics who occupied Irenaeus's attention in the late second century had a characteristic move when pressed on Scripture: they would concede the text, then dissolve it. The writings were ambiguous, they said, or corrupted, or useful only to those already initiated into the oral tradition their teachers preserved. Irenaeus had watched this happen enough times to name it plainly in Against Heresies 3.2.1, written around 180 A.D. — these men, when "confuted from the Scriptures, turn round and accuse these same Scriptures, as if they were not correct, nor of authority." The move was familiar then. It is familiar now, though the vocabulary has changed. What made Irenaeus's response to this significant was not its forcefulness but its structure. He did not answer the Gnostics primarily by appealing to episcopal authority or to liturgical tradition, though he valued both. He answered them by going back to the text. His argument in 2.30.6 is almost blunt about it: ...

The year the Orthodox Creed appeared in print, 1679, England was still bruised from the Clarendon Code and the Five Mile Act, both of which had made life for Dissenters legally precarious for nearly two decades. Baptists in particular found themselves in a very precarious situation, caught between a restored monarchy hostile to nonconformity and a culture of religious suspicion that made any confession of faith simultaneously a theological document and a political act. Thomas Monck wrote the Orthodox Creed for the English General Baptists residing in Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, and Oxfordshire, congregations that held an Arminian soteriology and had been organizing regionally since at least the Standard Confession of 1660. The creed was drafted following a Baptist regional assembly held in Buckinghamshire in 1678, and intended to function as an official statement for the General Assembly of General Baptists in England. The confession is organized around fifty articles...

Leonardo's Last Supper is set at high noon, daylight flooding through the windows, the disciples all seated on one side of a banquet table laden with fish and leavened bread. Mark and Luke are clear: this was a Passover, eaten at night, with participants reclining. There is no lamb, no unleavened bread, and the choreography is entirely wrong. But the painting has so colonized the collective imagination that most people, asked to picture the Last Supper, see Leonardo's staging and nothing else. This is the pattern across a majority of the most celebrated works in Western Christian art: the evangelists get revised, quietly and brilliantly, into something the painter's own century could absorb. Giotto's Nativity (1305, Scrovegni Chapel) gives us a rustic stable, an ox and ass, Mary reclining in exhaustion. Matthew mentions magi; Luke mentions a manger and shepherds. The stable is nowhere. The animals come from Isaiah 1:3 by way of medieval imagination. Giotto's visua...