Architecture of Sacrifice

July 23, 2018 By Peter Leithart

Architecture, Ruskin claims (Seven Lamps of Architecture), isn’t the same as building. Architecture refers to the specifically artistic features of a building, and the specifically artistic features have to do with adornment and not function: “Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use. I say common; because a building raised to the honor of God, or in memory of men, has surely a use to which its architectural adornment fits... Read more

Types of Color

July 19, 2018 By Peter Leithart

John Ruskin was the main art critic of his time; he was an artists himself, and also wrote on a variety of other topics, especially on the state of English politics and economy. He abandoned explicit attachment to Evangelical Christianity but remained deeply indebted. He provides an excellent example of the persistence of typological structures of thought into the latter part of the nineteenth century, when orthodox Christianity was in something of a decline. In his discussion of the paintings... Read more

The Typological Imagination

July 18, 2018 By Peter Leithart

Typological forms of thought weren’t confined to sermons and commentaries, but made their way into 19th-century English poetry. -Some poets put typology to orthodox uses, though here we can see divergent deployments of a similar typology. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote a poem, Casa Guidi Windows (1851) about the Browning home in Florence. In one section, she speaks of the priesthood of Christ and the effect it has on the formation of the church: Through heaven’s gate The priestly ephod... Read more

Victorian Typology

July 17, 2018 By Peter Leithart

Typology was a traditional method of reading Scripture, one that persisted into the Victorian age. Most obviously, this took the traditional form of finding shadowy figures of Christ in Old Testament characters and institutions and promises. J.C. Ryle, a leading Evangelical Anglican, claimed that one “golden chain” runs through the whole of Scripture – it is entirely about Christ: “no salvation excepting by Jesus Christ. The bruising of the serpent’s head, foretold in the days of the fall, – the... Read more

Knowing as Known

July 16, 2018 By Peter Leithart

Philosophers sometimes restrict “knowledge” to verifiable facts, logical inferences, statements, theories. In fact, knowing goes on all the time, in many modes and manners. As Esther Meek puts it, our lives are a tapestry of acts of knowing. Our knowing is nestled within God’s knowing. Our acts of knowing occur within the passivity of being-known. Psalm 139 is the Psalm of knowing. It begins, “Thou has searched me and known me, thou dost know when I sit down and when I... Read more

You Are Witnesses

July 12, 2018 By Peter Leithart

You are my witnesses, the Lord tells Israel. You will be my witnesses, Jesus tells the apostles before His ascension. All Christians are witnesses, “martyrs” in the original sense of the word. All Christians are also called to be “martyrs” in the more developed sense: We are all called to witness to Jesus by your life and words, no matter what the cost, no matter what the threat or danger. Few of us will suffer martyrdom in this developed sense.... Read more

Century of the Bible

July 11, 2018 By Peter Leithart

Brian Stanley (Christianity in the Twentieth Century) is aware that the “Bible is the fountainhead of all Christian traditions,” perennially central to the church’s life. But he suggests that “the twentieth century may have a better claim than any other to be labeled the century of the Bible” (9). He elaborates: “In the course of the century more peoples received the Scriptures in their own language than in any preceding century. As they did so, biblical narratives and the stories... Read more

The Picture of Epistemology

July 10, 2018 By Peter Leithart

Modern epistemology operates, Charles Taylor argues (A Secular Age); he covers some of the same ground in Retrieving Realism), within a “closed world system” (CWS). CWS describes the various “ways of restricting our grasp of things which are not recognized as such” (551). When one operates within a CWS, his “thinking is clouded or cramped by a powerful picture which prevents one seeing important aspects of reality.” For those within the system, the perspective seems natural and obvious. But that... Read more

Horsemen of the Apocalypse

July 9, 2018 By Peter Leithart

The horsemen who are summoned by the living creatures in Revelation 6 are known as “horsemen of the Apocalypse.” This is what they are, technically, since they are horsemen and they appear in a book called “the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ.” But usually that phrase implies something more: these horsemen, who represent horrors like war, famine, and death, represent a series of signs that will occur just before the end of the world. When you see the horsemen ride out,... Read more

Rahab

July 6, 2018 By Peter Leithart

Andrzej Toczyski’s The “Geometrics” of the Rahab Story offers an insightful, multi-layered close reading of Joshua 2. His syntactical analysis of the chapter examines the features of the text that steer the reader’s involvement in the story. His aim is to show how Joshua has been and is a “vehicle of literary communication.” The book includes detailed discussions of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern readings of the chapter, as well as Toczyski’s own discussion. He devotes a section of his own reading to... Read more