Short notes

File under oh, my. (a link to one of World magazine's sub-blogs - zeitgeist - about some bad, bad things in China)

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I get the Word of the Day emailed to me from Dictionary.com. Yesterday's word is a new favorite: afflatus (uh-FLAY-tuhs) noun: A divine imparting of knowledge; inspiration. Here is the etymology: Afflatus is from Latin afflatus, past participle of afflare, "to blow at or breathe on," from ad-, "at" + flare, "to puff, to blow." Other words with the same root include deflate (de-, "out of" + flare); inflate (in-, "into" + flare); soufflé, the "puffed up" dish (from French souffler, "to puff," from Latin sufflare, "to blow from below," hence "to blow up, to puff up," from sub-, "below" + flare); and flatulent.

It tickled me because it's a great, descriptive word to describe God's process of imparting the Scritpures to us. There's always been a little controvery about how to translate the word "theopneustos" (2 Tim. 3:16) - often it's just rendered "inspired", but it more literally means "expired" that is, "breathed out by." So the Scriptures have been breathed out by God. They are an afflatus from our King. Neat, huh?

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I'm greatly digging Athanasius' On the Incarnation (book review coming soon, d.v.). While discussing why death on the cross was the best and only option for Christ's death, he argues that the crucifixion proved Christ's victory over the worst, thus every other, death. A marvellous and mighty paradox has thus occurred, for the death which they thought to inflict on Him as dishonour and disgrace has become the glorious monument to death's defeat.