Category: Uncategorized
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Jonah: Terminal Dirty Work (7)
What is biblical “musing,” anyway? It’s certainly not exposition in the tightest sense of the term, but rather more like a meditative exploration of biblical texts at the periphery of what the text seems to suggest. If exposition is the wine, musing is like its bouquet. You live and take your stand on doctrinal truths…
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Jonah: Of Words and Deeds… Nay, Deeds (6)
Ok. We have to do some considerable grunt work on the terms mentioned in my last musing (i.e. great, bad, appoint, and fear), but for now let’s start afresh and have some fun. (Hopefully! Hopefully!) Let’s get a little philosophic: Everyone knows that there are words, and then there are deeds. The popular distinction between…
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Jonah: Taking Stock & More Authorial “Strategery” (5)
Let’s take stock of things: Either by way of argument, assertion, or suggestion I’ve offered the following claims for consideration: The book of Jonah is decidedly about Jonah’s (at that time) unique spiritual condition. We are slowly attempting to decipher the exact nature of that condition and the author’s suggested remedy for it. Jonah’s hardened…
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Jonah: Alas, More Questions… But Not Just Questions. (4)
Yesssss, we’re taking our sweet time. Why? Because we can. And… because it’s good. I think it was Nietzsche who famously hated newspapers and coffee: he wanted minds that ran like the Ganges– slow, steady, deep, and strong. Perhaps nothing proves a better antidote to a harried life of the news cycle and caffeine than…
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Jonah: International Man of Mystery (3)
So I’ve raised the simple question as to whether the book of Jonah naturally raises questions that any reasonable individual would ask in simply reading the text. Or perhaps, more precisely, that the author has deliberately written in such a way as to compel us to ask specific questions. I think he does, and once…
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“The Book of the Genealogy of Jesus Christ” (1)
If we are aware of the Old Testament tradition of “Hebrew meditative literature,” and dare to assume that the New Testament writers were familiar with this tradition, then it shouldn’t be difficult to recognize how very odd the opening of Matthew’s Gospel is, and why this shouldn’t surprise us at all. It reads: “The book…
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Jonah: We Puzzlings, the Torah, and Instruction… (2)
Jonah is puzzling. The book of Jonah is puzzling. But so are we humans, who are by far the most puzzling creatures in existence. We begin ignorant, dominated by passions over which we have little to no control: Yes, those 2-year-olds aren’t tyrants so much as they are slaves whipped around by their insides, crying…
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The Central Message of Jonah is … Jonah?
I’d like to offer some musings on the book of Jonah, and I’d like to begin by asking a question: What if the book of Jonah were really about Jonah? Not the storm. Not the sailors. Not the fish. And not even about “great” Nineveh or its king, its nobles, its commoners, or their children…
Musing with Xenzenshu 