Unbearable burden of Evangelicalism

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:50 pm By Peter Leithart

Anti-sacramental, anti-ritual evangelicalism emphasizes a personal relationship with God, but tends to encourage what Anthony Giddens calls “pure relationship,” a relationship that is not tacked down with external anchors and supports. A live-in relationship, without benefit of the rites and legalities of marriage, is a pure relationship. Evangelicalism tends to encourage a live-in relationship with Jesus. This is wrong, a departure from Christian tradition, and unbiblical. It also places unbearable burdens on the soul. Tempted by the devil, Luther slapped... Read more

Shaftesbury’s Natural Self

Last updated on: January 17, 2007 at 6:39 pm By Peter Leithart

Lori Branch describes the paradoxical pursuit of “natural” self in Shaftesbury’s private “Exercises.” It is not a pretty sight. He seeks integrity in unified affections, but this unity is achieved only at the cost of dismemberment: “In search of the natural self, Shaftesbury imagines himself with clothing removed and even limbs cut off, dissecting and asking again and again ‘What am I?’ and finally answering in a bold hand ‘A Mind.’” Where his public writings emphasize natural sociability, the private... Read more

Shaftesbury’s Natural Self

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:01 am By Peter Leithart

Secularism and suffering

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:02 am By Peter Leithart

Talal Asad suggests that secularism assumes that human beings live and choose on the basis of a “calculus of pleasure and pain.” Pain is unredeemable, and so secularism can respond to suffering only by trying to minimize it – soothing it with drugs, distracting through narcotic entertainment, reducing risk through gargantuan social programs. At its heart, secularism is denial of the redemptive power of suffering, and particularly the Christian confession of the redemptive power of the cross. Nothing good can... Read more

Chiasm in 1 John 4

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:48 pm By Peter Leithart

1 John 4:12-17 is organized as a chiasm: A. No one beheld God, 12a B. Mutual love, God abides, love perfected, 12b C. Abiding in God, He in us, 13 D. Bear witness to the Savior, 14 D’. Confessing that Jesus is Son, 15a C’. God abides in him, he in us, 15b B’. God’s love for us, abiding in God, love perfected, 16-17a A’. As He is, we are in the world, 17b At the same time, another structure... Read more

Why Study Rosenstock-Huessy

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:48 pm By Peter Leithart

Following are some notes from a lecture on Rosenstock-Huessy, the first session of a class on his work. The scope of his life work is amazing. He wrote on language, religion and the Bible, calendars, time, grammar, a massive and detailed history of the Western world, but he was trained in law and taught the history of law in Germany universities. He’s unclassifiable. When he came to America, he was qualified to teach in several different positions at the college... Read more

Himmelfarb on Hard Times

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:43 pm By Peter Leithart

Gertrude Himmelfarb has an excellent discussion of Hard Times in her book on poverty in the Victorian era. Below are some highlights. As Himmelfarb sees things, the problem in Coketown is not the factory but the way the factory spreads throughout, and shapes, the town. Himmelfarb: “Everything [in Coketown] is ‘severely workfull.’ The chapel resembles the warehouse, the jail looks like the infirmary, the town hall and the school are indistinguishable from the rest. The factory itself as it appears... Read more

Dickens and Modernity: Background

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:53 pm By Peter Leithart

This is the opening portion of a lecture on Dickens’s Hard Times, but I want to examine Dickens not only as an artist but in relation to his fictional depiction of what we think of as “modernity.” Modernity is in part a set of ideas and aspirations, a set of beliefs about progress and humanity’s place in the universe. But it is also, perhaps more basically, a social and political reality, a set of institutions and trends that have profoundly... Read more

Dickens and the French Revolution: Background

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:53 pm By Peter Leithart

A Tale of Two Cities was published in 1859, the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the original revolution, usually dated to the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. This stood to Dickens’s time approximately as WW II does for us. My parents, and your grandparents, remember WW II, and the same would be true of Dickens’s contemporaries. But the French revolution was in a sense even closer than that. The Napoleonic Wars had occupied Europe during the... Read more

Sermon Notes, Third Sunday After Epiphany

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:02 am By Peter Leithart

INTRODUCTION God is unseen, John says (v. 12). How then can the world know Him? John places the burden of showing God on us: The world knows the God who is love through the love we have for one another. THE TEXT “No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him, and He in us,... Read more