Typology of heresy

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

In his recent Brief History of Christianity , Carter Lindberg suggests that “orthodoxy is the language that preserves the promise character of the gospel, that salvation is received from God, not achieved by humans.” By contrast, “heresy is the language that in one way or another vitiates the promise of the gospel by making it contingent on human experience.” He cites Schleiermacher to give flesh to that skeletal definition. According to Schleiermacher, heresies were either anthropological or soteriological, pertaining to... Read more

Eschatological Vindication

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:36 pm By Peter Leithart

In his book on the work of Christ, Robert Letham has this neat summary of the relation of present to future justification: “faith has an eschatological side to it. Paul can say we are justified by faith (Rom. 5:1) but he can equally talk of our being saved in hope (Rom. 8:24-25). Hope is oriented to the future, to the return of Christ, to the redemption of our bodies. Consequently, in faith we look ahead to the time when all... Read more

Shield of Aeneas

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

Philip Hardie argues that the shield of Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid makes significant use not only of the Homeric description of the shield of Achilles but of ancient allegorizations of Homer’s description: “The central feature of ancient exegesis is its insistence that the great circle of the Shield of Achilles, with its abundance of scenes, is an image of the whole universe, an allegory of the cosmos. The Shield of Aeneas is also an image of the creation of a... Read more

Aesthetics and counter-modern philosophy

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:45 pm By Peter Leithart

Andrew Bowie’s *Aesthetics and subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche* emphasizes the role of aesthetic theory in the development of post-Kantian notions of the subject. He points out that some philosophers challenged Cartesian and Kantian views by direct appeal to aesthetic experience: “these theories . . . regard the experience of natural and aesthetic beauty and the fact of aesthetic production as vital to understanding self-consciousness.” In particular, the theorists who employ aesthetic conceptualities focus on music, and Bowie suggests there... Read more

Privileging Sight

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:03 am By Peter Leithart

For postmoderns, there is a close link between the timeless self of ancient and modern thought and the primacy of the gaze. The exaltation of the visual that Foucault attacks is expressed quite openly in an essay by Hans Jonas, “The Nobility of Sight,” who describes some of the philosophical consequences of this primacy. According to Jonas, the distinction of temporal and eternal “rests upon an idealization of ‘present’ experienced visually as the holder of stable contents as against the... Read more

A Faustian Christmas

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:45 pm By Peter Leithart

A bit of nonsense from several years ago. Scene 1 Mr Faust sitting in a big chair, with Little Faust on his lap, reading. Mrs Faust sitting in another chair, knitting or something. Mr Faust: And I heard him exclaim As he drove out of sight Merry Christmas to all And to all a good night. (Closing book). Well, that’s what happens on the night before Christmas. How did you like it? Little Faust: It’s not real, is it, Daddy?... Read more

Sermon Outline, Third Advent

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

INTRODUCTION The Roman Catholic church teaches many false things about Mary the mother of Jesus, but in reaction Protestants have sometimes simply ignored her. Like Joseph, she is a model of discipleship; and she is a living portrait of the church, the people in whom Christ takes shape (cf. Galatians 4:19-20). Everything this text teaches us about Mary is true, in an analogous way, of the church. THE TEXT “Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by... Read more

Oracular and Death

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:05 am By Peter Leithart

Michel Foucault suggests that the modern exalation of sight, the gaze, particularly the medical gaze, is associated with death: “That which hides and envelops, the curtain of night over truth, is, paradoxically, life; and death, on the contrary, opens up to the light of day the black coffer of the body: obscure life, limpid death, the oldest imaginary values of the Western world are crossed here in a strange misconstruction that is the very meaning of pathological anatomy . .... Read more

Identity and time

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:44 pm By Peter Leithart

The Western quest for “personal identity” rests, in part, on a confusion of different senses of the term. We recognize that there are degrees of sameness among things: Identical twins are never strictly identical. Paul Ricoeur has pointed out, further, that we tend to confuse two senses of “identity,” which he explicates using the Latin terms idem and ipse. As explained by Calvin O. Schrag, (more…) Read more

The Book of Mordecai

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

Grading several papers on Esther, it occurs to me that the book is more about Mordecai’s exalation than about Esther. Esther’s exalation to queen is part of the means by which Mordecai and the Jews are ultimately saved, and the story climaxes with Mordecai at the right hand of the king (like Joseph and Daniel – Esther 10:2). Further, the key moral transition in the book comes when Mordecai stops urging Esther to hide her identity. A disappointment for feminist... Read more