Daily Archives: February 14, 2010

Where’s the hole?

Posted by on February 14, 2010 34 comments

It seems to me that most of us — and by “us” I mean those of us who tend to read and write theology blogs — have at least one big hole in our education that we tend to regret and be somewhat annoyed about. For my part its definitely the paucity of my languages. I have a good working knowledge of Hebrew, despite being out of practice and some Greek, but as far as academic languages go that’s it. No German, no Latin, no French. And it bums me out.

Well, that’s the hole I think I have in my academic theological cred. What’s yours?

An apocalyptic “style”

Posted by on February 14, 2010 3 comments

David Toole has some comments about what that notion means:

An apocalyptic style is a way of acknowledging the strangeness of this biblical world and, by extension, the world generally . . . [apocalyptic style] founds itself not upon the identity of the same but upon the otherness of a world that never ceases to be strange. In this world, history continues not because of what kings and presidents might do but because ravens keep alive a prophet starving in the desert (1 Kings 17) and because even as kings and presidents count their people and take their polls and plan the future, the word of God comes into the wilderness (Luke 3). (Waiting For Godot in Sarajevo, 210)
Or, one might say that an apocalyptic style is a mode of doing theology which takes the utterly miraculous nature of biblical faith seriously. Of course, this can be a pretty embarrassing thing to do.

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