Which Job 14:14?

"We may recall that in the Hebrew version of Job 14:14, the writers ask a rhetorical question, 'If a man die, shall he live again?' The answer the ancient Hebrew writers supply is a resounding 'no'. The Septuagint translation, however, change 14:14 from an interrogatory to a declaratory, and thus dramatically change the meaning of the received text to, "If a man die, he shall live again.'
"The Septuagint translators took a similar approach to 42:17, where they added the claim that Job would experience resurrection of the body at the end of time, though there is nothing in the Hebrew that gave the writers warrant for this addition."

-- The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, Volume Two: Job in the Medieval World, Stephen Vicchio, 2006, p. 13-14.

Goethe on God, March 11, 1832

"To the end of his life Goethe believed that God 'is continually active in higher natures, to lead on those with lesser powers'. These are the last words of Goethe quoted by Eckermann in the third part of the Conversations. He could not conceive God as a Being apart from the world, responsible only for its first creation and for pushing it round, as it were, from outside. He had not been idle since the six days of creation but had revealed Himself repeatedly, not only in prophets and teachers, but in artists and scholars too, as well as in His own works in nature, as Goethe was never tired of saying. This is a mythical way of expressing a kind of humanism which, while rejecting the idea of special revelation and making use poetically of many different mythologies at different times, was yet not guilty of spiritual pride. Goethe could not think of the work of even a Mozart, a Raphael or a Shakespeare, to quote the last Eckermann conversation again, as 'completely of this world, and nothing more than a product of purely human forces'. Creation was going on continually, both in nature and man, and there was a mystery about it which, though it could be dispelled in part by study, always retained something which we must be content to regard 'with quiet reverence'.

-- Culture and Society inn Classical Weimar, W. H. Bruford, 1962p. 179. (Quotes from Conversations with Goethe, March 11, 1832.)

"...they suppose the system of Providence...", Boston, 1808

"While they demand a seven-years apprenticeship, for the purpose of learning to make a shoe, or an axe; they suppose the system of Providence, together with the numerous, and frequently abstruse,  doctrines and precepts, contained in the Scriptures, may be all comprehended without learning labour, or time. While they insist, equally with others, that their property shall be managed by skilful agents, their judicial causes directed by learned advocates, and their children, when sick, attended by able physicians; there were satisfied to place their Religion, their souls, and their salvation, under the guidance of quackery."

-- Timothy Dwight, A Sermon Preached at the Opening of the Theological Institution in Andover, Boston, 1808; cited in The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan O. Hatch, 1989, p. 19.

Job and the Resurrection

"That the book of Job was completed before the concept of the resurrection of the body became a part of the metaphysical view of the ancient Jews is undeniable. ...the major view about death in the book of Job is quite naturalistic. This fact, perhaps more than any other, goes a long way to explaining why the book of Job ends with the rather unsatisfactory solution in which Job receives everything back double, including a new set of children. By the completion of Job in its present form in the sixth century BCE, the notion of a covenant beyond the grave was not yet a part of the intellectual landscape of the ancient Jew. In Job, if the rewarding of the righteous was to happen, it would have to be in this life.

-- The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, Volume One: Job in the Ancient World, Stephen J. Vicchio, 2006, p. 44-45.

A burial in Königsberg, February 1804, and Job 14:14

"It was still brutally cold on the day of the funeral [February 28, 1804]; but, as winter days in Königsberg often could be, it was also beautifully bright and clear. Scheffner [his oldest surviving friend] wrote about a month later to a friend:

'You will not believe the kind of tremor that shook my entire existence when the first clumps of earth were thrown on the coffin -- my head and heart still tremble...'

It was not just the cold that made Scheffner shiver. Nor was it simply the fear of his own death....The tremor that would reverberate in his head for days and weeks had deeper causes. Kant, the man, was gone forever. The world was cold, and there was no hope -- not for Kant, and perhaps not for any of us. Scheffner was only too much aware of Kant's belief that there was nothing to be expected after death. Though in his philosophy he had held out hope for eternal life and a future state, in his personal life he had been cold to such ideas. Scheffner had often heard Kant scoff at prayer and other religious practices. Organized religion filled him with ire. It was clear to anyone who knew Kant personally that he had no faith in a personal God. Having postulated God and immortality, he himself did not believe in either. His considered opinion was that such beliefs were just a matter of 'individual needs'. Kant himself felt no such need."

-- Kant: A Biography, Manfred Kuehn, 2001, p. 3.

the fall of the Fall, ca. 1871

"Darwin's interpretation of nature was infinitely more damaging to a Christian vision of the world than the revolutions of either Copernicus or Newton. If the theories of these earlier scientists forced certain readjustments in the Christian conception of humanity's place in nature, they did not essentially threaten the Christian drama of Creation  Fall, and Redemption. Darwinism challenged the entire biblical account of the human race's unique creation, fall and need for redemption. The doctrine that humanity was the product of a long evolutionary process from lower to higher species appeared incompatible with the traditional interpretation of the Fall. In Darwin's opinion humankind had risen from a species of dumb animal, not fallen from a state of angelic perfection."

-- Modern Christian Thought: The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, Volume 1, 2nd ed., 1997, James Livingston, p. 255.

Puppet and Marionette

Puppet: 1520s from Old French poupette, diminutive of poupée "doll" (13c.), from Vulgar Latin *puppa, from Latin pupa "girl, doll".

Metaphoric extension to "person whose actions are manipulated by another" first recorded 1540s.

-- Online Etymological Dictionary

The Greek word translated as "puppet" is "νευρόσπαστος" (nevrospastos), which literally means "drawn by strings, string-pulling", from "νεῦρον" (nevron), meaning either "sinew, tendon, muscle, string", or "wire", and "σπάω" (spaō), meaning "draw, pull".

In French. marionette = "little Mary". One of the first figures to be made into a marionette was the Virgin Mary, hence the name.

-- Wikipedia

David Friedrich Strauss' Bad News, 1835

"Until the appearance of Strauss's Leben Jesu, it was widely assumed that the Gospel traditions were historical sources for the life of Jesus in the very same sense that Roman histories of Livy could be used as sources for the life of emperors; also, that the historical Jesus could easily be distinguished from the sources themselves, as the kernel can be extracted from its husk; even more, that Jesus as an historical personality, including his development and his self-consciousness, were accessible to historical research."

-- Modern Christian Thought: The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, Volume 1, 2nd ed., 1997, James Livingston, p. 219.

the unrising sun of 1793

"About forty years [~1870] ago a good woman, who kept the boarding house where I took my meals, related to me an anecdote about her father, a simple workingman of Nantes, which greatly impressed me. This man was very young when the [French] Revolution broke out. He accepted it with enthusiasm; took part in the struggle of the Jacobins against the Vendéeans; witnessed with regret the imperial regime destroy the democratic liberties so dearly bought; and at each revolution, in 1814, in 1830, in 1848, believed that the ideal republic, dreamed of in 1793, was about to be reborn. He died during the second Empire more than ninety years old  and at the moment of death, raising to heaven a look of ecstasy, was heard to murmur: 'Oh sun of '93, I shall die at last without having seen thy rays again.' This man, like the first Christians, lived in the hope of the millennium."

-- French Historian M. Gabriel Monod, Preface to Contributions à l'histoire religieuse de la révolution française, Albert Mathiez, 1907, cited in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, Carl L. Becker, 1932,  p. 158-159.

...our will be done, on earth as it was in...

"...the utopian dream of perfection, that necessary compensation for the limitations and frustrations of the present state, having long been identified with the Golden Age or the Garden of Eden or life eternal in the Heavenly City of God, and then by the sophisticated transferred to remote or imagined lands (the moon or Atlantis or Nowhere, Tahiti or Pennsylvania or Peking), was at last projected into the life of man on earth and identified with the desired and hoped-for regeneration of society."

-- The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, Carl L. Becker, 1932, p. 139.