Lord Thy God Research Articles

Wellbeing from a Yogic Perspective

In this article, I go beyond health and contemplate the Indian Yogic concept of wellbeing against the changing influences of different spiritual traditions in my life. I finally come full circle and consider what Indian metaphysical tradition best fits and throws light on Jesus’s affirmations “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind” and: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself “(Matthew 22:37-39); proclamations that have fascinated me since my childhood. The inquiry into these statements is a pointer to how we can live a most meaningful yogic life in full clarity and respect concerning all that exists around us.

The Other Wilderness: Outside the Text

And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, and to know what was in thy heart. —Deut 8:2 KJV Edward Abbey, born and raised in the early twentieth century in an evangelical family in rural Pennsylvania, is understandably placed not in the traditions of Christian literature but as a Western or Southwestern or Environmental writer. Fair enough. But to do so is to lose sight all too often of the theological core of Abbey’s use of wilderness. His father may have been a Wobbly, but his mother was an evangelical Christian. Men have mothers too. In his 1968 classic Desert Solitaire Abbey asks: Wilderness. The word itself is music. Wilderness wilderness … We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination. Why such allure in the very word? What does it really mean? (Abbey 189) and in his answer to that question, he reveals his own profound debtto both the imagery and the theology of the Old Testament: Under that desert sun in that dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean; the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore sublime. (219)

The Triangle of Empire:Sport, Religion, and Imperialism in Puerto Rico's YMCA, 1898–1926

In 1891, Luther H. Gulik, a prominent member of the international leadership of the YMCA of the United States, established the triangle as the YMCA symbol. He saw the triangle as a symbol imbued with Christian beliefs that would become the spearhead of a worldwide missionary movement. About the Triangle, Gulik wrote:The triangle stands . . . for the symmetrical man, each part developed with reference to the whole, and not merely with reference to itself. . . . What authority have we for believing that this triangle idea is correct? It is scriptural. . . . Such statements as, “Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God with all they heart and soul and mind and strength,” indicate . . . the scriptural view . . . that the service of the Lord includes the whole man. The words, which in the Hebrew and Greek are translated “strength,” refer in both cases entirely to physical strength.As the YMCA International Committee's first secretary for athletic work (1889–1902), Gulik had strong reason to create a symbol that could be recognized anywhere in the world. He was a firm believer in the expanding Muscular Christianity movement, which glorified patriotic duty and manliness expressed through athletics, and a strong believer in the civilizing agency of missionary Protestantism as it sought to establish a United States Christian righteous empire.

The Humanization of Economic Life: The Legacy of Martin Buber

In this article, I explore how our economic life can be reconciled with Martin Buber’s norm of dialogical life or communion. Known for his lifelong advocacy of dialogue between persons and between nations, Buber has tirelessly emphasized the necessity of restoring immediacy between fellow beings. Every human being is called to communion with his and her fellow beings. Such fellowship is the precondition for a truly human life. Given the technological and bureaucratic organization of our political and economic lives, this fundamental need is not being fulfilled. Instead of communion, it is the will to dominate and objectify that is fostered and normalized. The transcendence of this inhuman condition is what is entailed by the transition to the I-Thou relation. I here explain what it means to approach someone as a Thou, Buber’s reconceptualization of love, and the relationship between unified souls and a wholesome economy.

For the Letter Killeth

For the Letter Killeth Peter Heinegg The Ten Commandments: A Short History of an Ancient Text. By Michael Coogan, New Haven, CT: Yale U.P., 2014. xiii + 176 pp. $25 (paper). In this breezy‐but‐scholarly plaidoyer, Michael Coogan, who's the director of publications for the Harvard Semitic Museum and a lecturer on the Hebrew Bible at HDS, explores the origin, structure, age, and “original meanings” of the Decalogue, while exposing simplistic attempts to present and promote it as the divinely revealed essence of all morality. He begins in 1956, with the dedication of a Ten Commandments monument in Dunseith, North Dakota, by a group of worthies including Charlton Heston, who would shortly appear as the nation's iconic Moses in Cecil B. DeMille's blockbuster. He moves on to the Supreme Court's 2005 decision approving another such monument on the capitol grounds of Austin, Texas, which it judged to be more historical than religious (a fallacy Coogan makes short work of). Alas, he doesn't have time for the antics of Roy S. Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, who gained instant celebrity in 2003 by defying a federal appeals court order to remove the 5,400‐pound granite monument of the Ten Commandments from the rotunda of the state judicial building in Birmingham. (Moore is also the author of the ironically titled poem.”America The Beautiful,” which laments the decline of old‐time religion with couplets like, “Our children wander aimlessly poisoned by cocaine,/ Choosing to indulge their lusts, when God has said abstain.”) In any case, such slow‐moving targets (along with the millions of citizens who support them) can't escape Coogan's well‐aimed barrage. Such people literally don't know what they're talking about. For starters, which version of the Commandments are they championing, the one in Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5, or Deuteronomy 34, all of which are to some degree incompatible with one another. (Exodus 20 lumps one's neighbor's wife together with all his other property, while Deuteronomy 5 treats her as a person.) When it comes to numbering the various Commandments, Jews disagree with Catholics and Lutherans, who in turn disagree with Anglicans, most other Protestants, and the eastern Orthodox. Is “I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt” (KJV) an actual commandment or just a prologue? But the grossest distortion in piously polemical citings of the “Ten Words” (as the Tanakh calls them) is the enormous cuts Decalogue enthusiasts make in the original text(s). Apart from their inconvenient length, much of the deleted “extra” material is downright embarrassing. The ban on “graven images” (which Catholics studiously ignore) also has God saying that he punishes children for the iniquity of the fathers (or parents) “to the third and fourth generation of those that hate me” (Exodus 20:5). Corporate guilt, which Jeremiah and Ezekiel—as well as Deuteronomy 24:16—later reject, is taken for granted here. And the longest commandment of all, the fourth (or third), which forbids work on the Sabbath (Orthodox Jews keep that one, but nowadays who else does?) unfortunately mentions that it's a time of rest for male and female slaves, a reminder that nowhere does the Bible condemn slavery. In any event, Sunday is the first day of the week, not the Sabbath; so Christians, except for Seventh Day Adventists, worship on the wrong day—though they conceal this by speaking of “The day of the Lord,” rather than the Sabbath. The unobjectionable‐sounding ban on adultery is actually scandalous because “adultery” in the Bible applies only to sleeping with another man's wife; a married man's having sex with an unmarried woman is not adultery, but a lesser offense punished by the payment of a fine to the woman's father‐owner and the requirement of marrying her (polygyny is o.k.). There is no doubt whatsoever that the Decalogue consigns women to permanent inferiority. As John L. McKenzie, S.J., notes in his authoritative Dictionary of the Bible, “The wife and her partner could violate the rights of her husband, but the wife had no rights which...

Jesus’s Two Great Commandments: Analysing Indian Theology through Caste and Gender

The article attempts to problematize Christian theology sociologically, navigating it through the minefield of the ‘Two Great Commandments’ given by Jesus, within the Indian context of caste and gender. ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God ’, the First Commandment which mandates the believers to love God becomes intriguing as it forces one to ask who is my God and how do I relate to the form of this God? The article looks at how Dalit theology experiences Jesus as opposed to upper-caste theology. The Second Commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself ’, becomes more challenging than the First in an Indian context because it contradicts the practices of caste and gender discrimination. For Indian Christians the idea of ‘love thy neighbour’ then reworks back into the question of who is ‘allowed’ to be my neighbour. The article analyses Jesus through his historical existence rather than his divinity.

Recent Articles

Recent Articles* Brian Michael Norton, Brian McCrea, Danielle Spratt, Karen Prior Swallow, Brian Michael Norton, Nora F. Crow, Alexander Pettit, Takeshi Sakamoto, and Manuel Schonhorn ASTELL Newton, Geoff. “Divine and Human Love: Letters between John Norris and Mary Astell, Laurence Sterne and Eliza Draper,” Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson, ed. Melvyn New and Gerard Reedy, S. J. Newark: Delaware, 2010. Pp. 183–201. Emphasizing mystical and Neoplatonic elements in the 1767 correspondence between Sterne and Eliza Draper and the 1693–1694 correspondence between John Norris and Mary Astell, Mr. Newton examines divergences of divine and human love. At one end of the spectrum is Norris, for whom the love of God “ought to be intire and exclusive of all other Loves,” a principle Mr. Newton locates in the Jewish Shema, as spelled out in Deuteronomy 6:5 (“thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart . . .”). Norris, according to Mr. Newton, “displaced whatever human sexual feelings he may have had” onto a “mystically conceived image of God,” which he characteristically described in “the erotic language of sexual love.” (A secondary and largely speculative argument [End Page 3] of Mr. Newton’s essay is that Norris may have had such feelings for the young Astell.) While sharing Norris’s suspicions of human sexuality and his aim of “displacing it onto a safer spiritual realm,” Astell had reservations about Norris’s rejection of all but divine love: For her, “the love of human friendship is vital and real, and cannot be excluded from her love of God, however much she says she agrees with Norris that it should be. . . .” Some seventy-three years later, Sterne continues Astell’s trajectory away from Norris, embracing not only the love of friendship, but sexual desire itself. For Sterne, as Mr. Newton aptly writes, “The love of God was not exclusive of all other loves, but was to be found, and indeed fulfilled, in expressions of care toward one’s neighbor, and if one’s neighbor was an attractive woman, he refused to be moralized out of his desire.” Sterne’s reversal of Norris here is so complete that some readers may wonder if it is necessary to go through Norris to arrive at this unobjectionable conclusion. Mr. Newton, however, asks us to consider this as a rigorously theological position on the nature and obligations of love. So while Sterne rejects Norris’s specific view of the relation between divine and human love, he does so, Mr. Newton insists, within the conceptual framework of Norris’s Christian Neoplatonism. Ultimately, Sterne’s desire for Eliza is neither a distraction from God, as Norris would have it, nor a romantic or sentimental indulgence, as secular readings may assume: more complexly, more mystically, it “intertwines the real woman with the holy presence.” In particular, Mr. Newton persuasively clarifies Sterne’s theological debts to Norris. Brian Michael Norton California State University, Fullerton BEHN Gonthier, Ursula Haskins. “ ‘La différence de couleur n’en fait point dans l’âme’: Behn’s Oroonoko and the French Anti-Slavery Debate,” BJECS, 31 (2008), 209–222. Behn’s role as an abolitionist writer has been bandied about for well over a century, probably as a cover to allow the reading of an “immoral” woman’s writing. In 1899, Wilbur Cross saw Oroonoko as a “humanitarian novel” intended “to awaken Christendom to the horrors of slavery.” Critics such as Edward Seeber and Wylie Sypher worked to correct this concept, which derived from the later eighteenth-century plays based on Thomas Southerne’s 1696 adaptation and from the French tradition established by Pierre Antoine de La Place’s translation, which provides the happy ending of the two royal slaves’ repatriation to Coramantien. La Place’s translations (there were several editions with expanded material) effect a paradigm shift in French thinking about Africans and slavery, epitomized by Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois in 1748 and the encyclopédistes. This study traces the impact of La Place’s translation and the influential review of it by Elie-Catherine Freron, to the bio-bibliographical notices by Pierre Bayle and Jacques Georges de Chaufepié. The essay significantly contributes to...

The Salvation Story in Russian Literature

The Salvation Story in Russian Literature

Iconoclasm in the Old and New Testaments

ICONOCLASM in the OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS Peter Goldman Westminster State College ofSalt Lake City Acentral problem for any monotheistic religion is distinguishing worship of the one true God from idolatry in all its forms. René Girard's pioneering interpretation ofthe Judeo-Christian scriptures clarifies this distinction by recourse to an ethical conception ofthe sacrificial: False religion or idolatry is essentially sacrificial, while the Judeo-Christian tradition opposes the sacrificial in all its myriad forms. As Girard explains, the Passion narrative makes clear that the sacrificial or scapegoat victim, Christ, is innocent. The violence inflicted upon Christ is human, not divine. The Gospels thus reveal the violence that hides behind the sacred. Religious practices that further sacrificial violence are idolatrous, worshiping violence in the guise ofthe sacred.1 The ethical simplicity of the Girardian distinction between true faith and idolatry is complicated, however, by the issue of representation. According to the Old Testament, the one true God cannot be represented by images or figures of any kind, while idols typically take figurai form. From a biblical perspective, therefore, the question ofform is central to an understanding of idolatry. The Old Testament ban on images has never been investigated from a Girardian perspective. In this essay I apply Rene Girard's anthropological insights to the subject oficonoclasm in the Old and New Testaments. More specifically I address the second command-ment, the famous ban on "graven images," and the problem of representing God. From the per- ' For a fuller treatment ofGirard's interpretation ofChristianity in relation to the sacrificial, see his Things Hidden since the Foundation ofthe World 84Peter Goldman spective ofGirard's "fundamental anthropology" there are two basic issues in this regard. The first is the ethical function of the ban on images; how does the second commandment function ethically to preserve the human community in the Bible? Second, is the ban on images sacrificial as understood in Girardian terms? Or is it anti-sacrificial and therefore ethically progressive? The second commandment reads: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth : Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God" (KJV, Exod. 20.4-5). At first glance, this commandment might appear as an expression ofthe most primitive form ofreligious taboo. A specific cultural activity is arbitrarily forbidden under threat of punishment . The taboo on images, unlike the law against murder for example, has no obvious moral dimension. Images of any kind must be violently expelled —sacrificed, as it were—for no immediate reason. According to the second commandment, any attempt to represent God or his creation by images is a profane violation of his "jealous" nature; the second commandment therefore often finds expression in the violent destruction ofsocalled idolatrous images. Acts oficonoclasm directed againstthe images of foreign gods are quite common in the Old Testament. Nevertheless, I argue here thatthe second commandment is in practical terms ethically progressive and anti-sacrificial. It actually questions and underminesthe whole sacred-profane dichotomy. Indeed, the ban on images is ultimately a secularizing influence crucial for the development of modernity. I also address the Christian acceptance of divine images, which has often been understood as a reversal of the Judaic ban on figurai representations . In the interpretation of iconoclasm that I am proposing here, however, the image ofChrist on the cross can be seen as a logical development of the second commandment rather than its contradiction. I. The second commandment in context In the Old Testament, the giving of the second commandment is associated with the Exodus from Egypt and the Hebrew rejection of Egyptian religion and culture. In Herbert Schneidau's book Sacred Discontent, he argues persuasively that Hebrew monotheism is first of all a reaction against pagan polytheism. Schneidau writes, "The JudeoChristian tradition defines itselfas opposed to a pagan world which it sees Iconoclasm in the Old and New Testaments85 as essentialIy mythological"(12). Further, "TheHebrews habitually defined themselves negatively, by their differences from their neighbors" (51). Schneidau explains: We find...

The Second Commandment: "Thou Shalt Not Bow Down Unto Them, Nor Serve Them, For I the Lord Thy God Am a Jealous God"

The Second Commandment: "Thou Shalt Not Bow Down Unto Them, Nor Serve Them, For I the Lord Thy God Am a Jealous God"

Law and Love in The Merchant of Venice

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE IS THE ONE PLAY of Shakespeare which can be called a work of Christian apologetics. Elements of Christian belief function importantly in several of Shakespeare's other plays, and he everywhere draws heavily upon the cultural endowment of Christianity, but only in The Merchant of Venice does he make an expressly Christian argument the basis for an entire play. The play is also notable for giving rise to a persistent impression among audiences and critics that the poet's real sympathies are at odds with the ostensible message of the piece. Anxiety about anti-Semitism doubtless predisposes modern audiences to fasten upon whatever may be found in the play to suggest that the poet was really of the Jew's party without knowing itor, at any rate, of the party of common humanity as against the particular Christian bias he assumed-but much that is not directly related to the treatment of Shylock has also been felt to counteract the play's Christian affirmation.' This should not surprise us, for it is of the very nature of that affirmation to incur just such a counter-interpretation. The play is in fact a kind of hermeneutic drama, reflecting the contest between Christian and Jew for the possession of Hebrew scriptures. The issue is joined on the subject of usury, on which the Old Testament provides a clear directive: Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury, but thou shalt not lend upon usury unto thy brother, that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all that thou setest thine hand

Contraception and Eve

‘ ... and one of them, a lawyer, put a question to try him: Master, which commandment in the law is the greatest? Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and thy whole soul and thy whole mind. This is the greatest of the commandments and the first. And the second, its like, is this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments, all the law and the prophets depend.’ (Matt. 22, 35-41)With these words Jesus pointed out the Way for man to come to God and the essence of that Way is a continuing love affair between each man and God, each man with himself for the love of God, and each with his neighbour whom he is commanded to love as he loves himself. Christianity is not only an intensely personal religion, binding each human person man and woman, directly to God in the love of friendship which we call charity, it is also an intensely social religion, because it commands that we love all of our neighbours as we love ourselves. As Christ clearly states, all of the commandments of the Law may be reduced to these two, because all of the commandments pertain to the ordering of self-love and love of neighbour to the love of God.The love of God is both the means to the end and the end itself of human life, insofar as we must continually be in love with God in this life, and ultimately be personally united with Him in life eternal.

Extra Supplement: My Soul, O Praise the Lord Thy God

Extra Supplement: My Soul, O Praise the Lord Thy God

After Six Days: A New Clue for Gospel Critics

The conception of a preliminary period of ritual preparation for occasions of special sanctity is common to many religions, including that of the Old Testament, where the touching of holy things or coming into the divine presence requires a period of previous abstinence from anything involving ceremonial defilement. In 1 Sam. 21 5 and Ex. 19 10, 15 this period is of “three days.” The longer period of “six days” is required for the supreme occasion when Moses meets Yahweh face to face on Sinai (Ex. 24 16), and this interval becomes as it were stereotyped in the most distinctive of Jewish institutions, the periodic seventh day “the sabbath of the Lord thy God,” to which the preceding six days of toil lead up. The Jew labors and does all his work in the first six days of the week in order that he may rest and enjoy the fruit of his toil the seventh day, just as in the creation Yahweh's activity had led up to a period of satisfied contemplation of all that He had made as “very good.” In like manner the later speculators of both Synagogue and Church expected the toil and turmoil of the six ages of “this world,” each of one thousand years’ duration, to lead up to the blessed repose and fruition of “the age to come,” ushered in by the “thousand years” of Messiah.

Capture After Capitulation: A Juristic Anachronism

One of the earliest mitigations of the horrors of war, particularly in its incidence upon private individuals, was the custom of sparing the inhabitants of a surrendered city in their persons and property, instead of subjecting them to the rapine and pillage which usually followed a capture by storm. Even the Mosaic Code made this exception in the midst of its barbarities, although the doomed cities of Canaan were excluded from the benefits of the exception. Both the general savagery and the one humane departure from it are well exemplified by verses ten to sixteen of the twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy: 10. When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it. 11. And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee,,then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee. 12. And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it. 13. And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword; 14. But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the Lord thy God hath given thee. 15. Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations. 16. But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.

Extra Supplement: Bless the Lord Thy God

Extra Supplement: Bless the Lord Thy God