Status Updates From The Mystery of Christ

Read most of the subsection on the economy of God, and the role of death in it, in two senses which Behr decouples: the "metaphorical" sense of death as a force that shackles, and literal bodily death. I think this decoupling is dubious, and Behr doesn't really justify it much besides doing it and then adding "metaphorical" to all the instances he wants to talk about "metaphorical" death. Seems to be "fear of death"?

An interesting critique of "the Fall" as some "event", somehow different from creation, alongside a re-evaluation of the oft-repeated idea of death as unnatural wholesale... Behr takes aim here at not just the Western conception of the fall of man, but the naive Eastern reformulation as well. he sets this up, pointing at how, for St. Paul, the introduction of such a concept is driven by Christ as hypothesis.

I liked this chapter much more. It is a very honest reflection at the idea of tradition, of doing theology, and whether "orthodoxy" can be reclaimed as a valid category in spite of the sobering reality.

Where to turn than to its founding champion, St. Irenaeus?

Some compelling evocations, some stretches of the imagination, and yet, genuine.

I get what this first chapter was going for, but, despite being so central to the book's thesis, it remains surprisingly weak in its attempt to centralize the Cross. Specifically, there remains no reason given to not conceptually separate the Cross and the Resurrection, bar an aphorism that "by His death Christ conquers death- no other way". Which only ever gets you as far as "there are inseparable"... a truism.

Chapter Two: Search the Scriptures