It is Caravaggio’s greatest work: The Beheading of St. John the Baptist.

When we board a plane we become partakers in a community, a civitas, a polity. We become a kind of loaf. We are bound together, even if only for a time, for better or for worse. We communally share in the crying children, the grouches in row ##, the rolling of the cart down the aisle, the inclement weather.

We live in a culture that imagines itself very parrhesia-ful, very proud and bold. And yet, we aren’t. All of our ostensible boldness and loud proclamation is a kind of veil drawn across the surface of an ever-deepening state of shame and panic. Foucault regards parrhesia as costly speech, a truthfulness that risks the life of the speaker. Contemporary American rhetoric is not parrhesia, for we want the costly speech but not the actual paying of the cost. We like the feeling of speaking truth to Power, but then are surprised when those in power prove just how powerful they are.

They are “so close” because, really and truly, resurrected humanity shall be clothed in glory (2 Cor. 5.1-5; cf. Rom 8.18-25) and move from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3.18); we shall be clothed in immortality (1 Cor. 15.50-55), shall draw food from the Tree of Life (Rev. 2.7), and rule over angels (1 Cor. 6.3)?

When people ask us, “What is the Bible?” we can give them a lot of answers and cite a lot of self-referential passages wherein the Scriptures speak about the Scriptures (e.g. 2 Tim. 3:16). But often that question, “what is the Bible"?”, is asking for more than a simple description. Folks who ask “what is the Bible?” are often asking for more than a single-sentence definition. Without denying the artful simplicity of simple descriptions and definitions, here are some a few more expansive reflections on “what is the Bible?”

What is Noah waiting for?

Laughter is a funny thing –but what is it? Is it speech? Is it non-speech, like the thump of a stone in the grass? Is it something “in-between” –a part of that company of things which includes the bark of dogs, the purr of cats, the whisper of tree branches, the caw of birds?

This is a paradox.

How can two things be “the same” and yet “different”? What allows for this tension?