The Hamlet Question

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:56 pm By Peter Leithart

In his history of Russian culture, James Billington notes the influence of Shakespeare’s Hamlet on modern Russian thought and drama. It was “one of the first plays to be regularly performed on the Russian stage,” so that “Hamlet became a kind of testing ground for the Russian critical imagination.” The main reason “lay in the romantic fascination with the character of Hamlet himself. Russian aristocrats felt a strange kinship with this privileged court figure torn between the mission he was... Read more

Traces

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:51 pm By Peter Leithart

Everyone with a more than elementary understanding of how language works knows that words can have different meanings in different contexts. The more intriguing phenomenon, and one exploited by poets and novelists, is that a word can have a different meaning, or a very different referent in a new context, and yet also bring with it a trace of its meaning in a different text. The Hebrew word for “ark” in Gen 6-9 is the same as the word for... Read more

Textual boundaries

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:56 pm By Peter Leithart

Perhaps we should not call it “intertextuality,” but something like intertextuality is necessary to textual meaning, even at the most basic levels. You cannot read a single sentence without bringing some knowledge of the language to bear on the text. The reader must have information from outside the text if he is going to understand anything. A text (or, better, a text’s author) can mean only as a piece of discourse in a world of discourses. Move a notch from... Read more

Trinitarian Intertextuality?

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:51 pm By Peter Leithart

The inherently inter-textual character of textual meaning appears to be a reflex of Trinitarian relations. To wit: Each person of the Triune God is God Himself. As the Athanasian creed said, The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God; yet there are not three gods but one God. The Father Almighty, the Son Almighty, the Spirit Almighty; and yet there are not three almighties but one Almighty. And so on. Each person has attributes, features, a... Read more

General Hermeneutics

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:42 pm By Peter Leithart

What’s needed is not a general hermeneutics developed from some philosophy of language or metaphysics. Rather, what’s needed is a general hermeneutics developed from the premise that NT readings of the OT do not represent some bizarre exception to the normal way of reading but provide a model for all reading. Hence, for instance, the NT readings of the OT raise (and perhaps help to resolve) questions about how meanings change with changed circumstances. Does Genesis 1:1 mean something different... Read more

Eucharistic meditation, First Sunday After Epiphany

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:39 pm By Peter Leithart

Ecclesiastes 3:14: I know that everything God does will remain forever; there is nothing to add to it and there is nothing to take from it, for God has so worked that men should fear Him. We saw in the sermon this morning that God has designed the world so that we can live well only if we live by faith. We cannot know what time it will be tomorrow. It may be a time to die, a time to... Read more

God does everything fitting

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:42 pm By Peter Leithart

God is the lead partner in the dance of life; we’re called to follow Him gracefully. But we don’t know whether it’s a waltz or the Charleston, and we don’t know what the next step will be. God is singing the melody that we are supposed to harmonize; but we don’t yet know whether it’s a military song or a dirge, and can’t where the melody is moving. We are learning the dance as we go, but are called to... Read more

Exhortation, First Sunday after Epiphany

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:40 pm By Peter Leithart

God’s people are a missionary people, and this is not true only of the New Testament church. God called Abraham to bless the Gentiles through him, and one of Israel’s recurring sins was her failure to carry out this mission. Israel was supposed evoke praise from the Gentiles, but instead her idolatries and sins caused the Lord’s name to be blasphemed. (more…) Read more

Justification by blame

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:45 pm By Peter Leithart

Trollope makes a neat Girardian point in Barchester Towers: “Wise people, when they are in the wrong, always put themselves in the right by finding fault with the people against whom they have sinned.” Read more

PostmodernismS

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:04 am By Peter Leithart

In Missional Church (1998; edited by Darrell Guder), Craig Van Gelder offers a helpful summary of the various meanings of postmodernism: 1) Economic: For Frederic Jameson and others, postmodernism is marked primarily by a shift to a globalized and consumer-oriented form of capitalism: “In the postmodern condition, all of life is turned into commodities that can be marketed; managed, national economies are shifting toward a global economy with worldwide financial structures beyond the control of any one country; and a... Read more

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