Abstract
Believers, such as Saint Augustine in his Confessions, sometimes confront the questions and challenges of philosophy. How can the faithful overcome the risk of self-deception? How can they be sure the God they worship corresponds to the true Lord of the universe? Philosophers, likewise at risk of grave illusions, must also ask themselves tough questions prompted by theologians. How can one who presumes to live a life of reason know that the life of faith is not infinitely superior? How, indeed, can a philosopher achieve certainty that the philosophic life is not self-destructively based on faith, even an inferior kind of faith? No truly thoughtful person can escape such penetrating queries.
To reverence is good: but on the one condition that the object of it be a thing which deserves reverence…[T]he man who in the best sense of the word is devout, is also the most cautious [about] to whom or to what he pays his devotion.
—James Anthony Froude, “Criticism and the Gospel History”1
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Notes
Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884), 198–99. Laura K. Field, Jules Gleicher, and John T. Ronan deserve sincere thanks for their astute comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
Robert Alter, “Genesis. Introduction,” in The Five Books of Moses (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2004), 12.
Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 163.
Leo Strauss, “Reason and Revelation,” in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 141–80;
Thomas L. Pangle, Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
George Anastaplo, The Bible. Respectful Readings (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2004), 15.
See Amy-Jill Levine and Mark Z. Brettler, eds., The Jewish Annotated New Testament (JANT) (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2: “Matthew’s Jesus is not only depicted as the ‘new Moses’ who interprets Torah for the people of Israel, but he is also Moses’s superior. For example, in Matthew’s temptation story (4.1–11) Jesus, like Moses, fasts for forty days and forty nights (4.2; cf. Deut. 9.9), is challenged to command stones (4.3; cf. Num. 20.8), and is shown ‘the kingdom’ (4.8; cf. Deut. 34.1). There, Jesus is shown ‘all the kingdoms’ of the world, but Moses is shown only Canaan. Furthermore, whereas Moses dies outside the Promised Land, Jesus returns (28.16–20); whereas Moses leads the people to their earthly home, Jesus leads followers to the kingdom of heaven. Moses receives the Torah from God and gives it to Israel; Jesus is the fulfillment of Torah as well as its authoritative interpreter.”
“The Fount of Wisdom, the only begotten Word of God, presiding in the highest places, through whom the Father has wisely made and sweetly disposed all things, willed at the end of the ages to take flesh, so that human insight might copy through the venture of bodily nature that splendor of his which it was too weak to reach in the heights of divine majesty.” Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea I (Southhampton: St. Austin Press, 1997), XIX. See also John Chrysostom’s more exuberant gloss on the same point: “For what is there that can equal these good tidings? God on earth, man in heaven; that long war ceased, reconciliation made between God and our nature, the devil overthrown, death abolished, paradise opened.” Ibid., 1.
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© 2013 Thomas L. Pangle and J. Harvey Lomax
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Lomax, J.H. (2013). Inexhaustible Riches: Mining the Bible. In: Pangle, T.L., Lomax, J.H. (eds) Political Philosophy Cross-Examined. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299635_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299635_5
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