Idle musings by a once again bookseller, always bibliophile, current copyeditor and proofreader. Complete with ramblings about biblical studies, the ancient Near East, bicycling, gardening, or anything else I am reading (or experiencing). All more or less live from Red Wing, MN
Friday, June 21, 2024
It's all about … power
Such claims about God are rarely theological niceties: they serve the interests (polemical or material) of those who deploy them. This is to say nothing, either positive or negative, about the truth of such claims, but it alerts us to the possibility that, in perfecting divine grace in one form or another, a struggle for superiority may be at work. Perfecting a theological motif may constitute an implicit or explicit claim to theological correctness, discrediting those who understand (and even perfect) the concept in a different way. Where such conceptual perfection is matched by social practice, it becomes the ideology of a distinctive pattern of life, and can prove enormously powerful in legitimating a religious tradition.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 69
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