A diner after a curmudgeon's heart

As Mrs. Curmudgeon can tell you, I hate to read "homemade" as an adjective for a restaurant's fare, since said fare was actually prepared in said restaurant, not a home. Apparently, someone at Gunther Toody's corporate offices agrees: they now offer "dinermade" soups with their blue plate specials.

Unfortunately, this wonderful new adjective is trademarked, and so can't be used more widely. Every silver lining has a dark cloud, it seems.

Where would Luther cruise?

The hosts of the White Horse Inn spend a fair amount of time denouncing theologies of glory. Remarkably, they've found a way to do that and curry the patronage of the wealthy at the same time.

The structure of Proverbs 17:21-25

In terms of form, Proverbs 17:21-25 create a chiasm:

17:21- synthetic parallelism
17:22- antithetic parallelism
17:23- no parallelism
17:24- antithetic parallelism
17:25- synthetic parallelism

Given that 17:21 and 25 are thematically identical, the formal chiasm leads us to discover a thematic chiasm as well:

17:21- a father's grief over a foolish son
17:22- the effects of wisdom & folly
17:23- folly reaches its highest degree in wickedness
17:24- the choice between wisdom & folly
17:25- parents' grief over a foolish son

As the chiasm's frame, 17:21 and 25 put a strong emphasis on folly's effect on the family. However, because 17:23, the chiasm's center point, explores how wicked folly can corrupt government institution, the text's subject is the broader society, rather than the narrower family.

A question only foster parents ask

At a recent foster parent training seminar, Mrs. Curmudgeon and I had Baby #4 in tow, then exactly four weeks old. Several people approached us during the breaks, asking some variation of "So how old was she when she was placed in your home?"

Despise the dash

While I find the dash listed as an acceptable punctuation mark in all reputable style guides, I cannot accept it. So far as I can tell, the dash exists to set off sentence fragments from their contexts. However, any sentence fragment could simply be rewritten to create a proper sentence. Thus, the dash announces to the reader, "I, the writer, can't be bothered to take the time to construct sentences with care or, let's be honest, a modicum of attention; hence, you may reasonably conclude I don't like you very much."

In other words, the dash is the height of rudeness, and rudeness is never acceptable.

The restoration & the Church

What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said,
“I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
Therefore go out from their midst,
and be separate from them, says the Lord,
and touch no unclean thing;
then I will welcome you,
and I will be a father to you,
and you shall be sons and daughters to me,
says the Lord Almighty.”

In 2 Corinthians 6:16-18, Paul paraphrases and combines Ezekiel 37:27 (via Leviticus 26:11-12), Isaiah 52:11, Ezekiel 20:34, and 2 Samuel 7:14 to demonstrate that the New Testament Church is the temple of the living God. With the exception of 2 Samuel 7, these verses all come from passages prophesying the return of the exiles from Assyria and Babylon to Judah. (Even Leviticus 26 can be read in this way.) Thus, I was surprised when none of the commentaries I consulted made much of this fact. Along with his use of Hosea in Romans 9, this passage demonstrates the way in which Paul saw the Restoration promises fulfilled: first in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, but with much greater effect in the work of Christ and the joining of Jew and Gentile in the Church.

2 points:
1) As Christians, we would do well to think through the implications of the Church as the Restoration of Israel from exile.
2) Given how the Restoration prophecies of Jeremiah 31 are developed in Hebrews, here is another good reason to believe Paul is in fact the author of that epistle as well.

Funny

But perhaps too subtle to be 10 bucks worth of funny.

So glad I have an iPhone

David Byrne understands my needs.

Solomon, it seems, was a hiker

Let a man meet a she-bear robbed of her cubs
rather than a fool in his folly.
-Proverbs 17:12

So did he have little bells on his sceptre?

With Choirs of Angels

I suggest getting yourself on Wordmp3.com's e-mail list because a good many of the site's free downloads are wonderful little gifts. I just listened to a lecture by Ken Myers, "With Choirs of Angels: Music and Transcendent Order," in which he eloquently and succintly argues the Church must cultivate in her members an understanding of order in music (over against choosing music merely on the basis of preference) as part of her broader program of enabling them to find order in the cosmos itself.

Which I guess you might expect from an Episcopalian.

The structure of Proverbs 16:31-17:6

In his NICOT commentary (vol. 2, pp. 35-36), Bruce Waltke argues Proverbs 16:31-17:6 form a unit because the framing verses share the words "crown" and "glory," and both are on the theme of old age. However, 17:6 adds sons to the mix. The center verse of the text, 17:2, is the only other place we find a mention of sons. This suggests the theme is the outworking of cross-generational relationships within a family, which is confirmed when we see the text forms a chiasm:

A: the glory of the righteous aged (16:31)
B: the righteous' restraint under God's sovereignty (16:32-33)
C: man must make right spiritual judgments (17:1)
D: the true son is righteous & wise (17:2)
C': the Lord judges the spirits of men (17:3)
B': the wicked's self-indulgence under God's sovereignty (17:4-5)
A': the glory of righteous generations within a family (17:6)

The Christology of Proverbs 17:2?

A servant who deals wisely will rule over a son who acts shamefully
and will share the inheritance as one of the brothers.

Proverbs 17:2 may have a Christological emphasis. The wise servant who replaces the foolish son calls to mind the younger son motif of Genesis, in which the younger or youngest son replaces the oldest son as the favored or designated heir (Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, Reuben and Joseph). This is in turn typological of Christ, the second Adam who replaced the first Adam as covenant head of God's people and mediatorial executor of God's plans. While Christ is the Son of God, he is also the Servant of Isaiah's songs.

Thus, there may be more going on in Proverbs 17:2 than a warning against nepotism.