Ward on Covenant of Works

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

Early in Ward’s book, he surveys mid sixteenth-century treatments of the effects of Adam’s sin, mainly to determine whether writers of that period conceived of God’s relationship with Adam as a covenantal one. His evidence suggests several important conclusions: 1) The early Protestant confessions do not describe Adam’s relationship to God as a covenant, nor do they speak about the imputation of Adam’s sin. There were theologians who spoke of a covenant with Adam and the imputation of sin, but... Read more

Kline on Covenant of Works

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:46 pm By Peter Leithart

In his very useful study, God & Adam: Reformed Theology and the Creation Covenant , Rowland S. Ward has this to say about Meredith Kline’s views on the un-gracious character of the covenant of works: “Contrary to his position in 1968, Kline does not wish now to admit any concept of ‘grace’ in the pre-fall relationship lest it cloud the reality that life was to be gained only in the way of obedience. After all, Christ finished the work he... Read more

More Bad Taste

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:10 am By Peter Leithart

I should clarify my final, hurried comments on Brown’s discussion of sin and bad taste. I suggested at the end of the last post that Brown’s initial mapping of the problem contributes to an unsatisfying conclusion regarding moral and aesthetic judgment. Brown argues that taste is community-specific, and thus subject to change over time. In an important sense, what writers of the age of Johnson judged to be good taste does not match what Romantic or Victorian writers judged as... Read more

Sin and Bad Taste

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

One of the challenges of a Christian aesthetics is sorting through the connections and distinctions between holiness and good taste on the one hand, and sin and bad taste on the other. In his 1989 book, Religious Aesthetics , Frank Burch Brown offers some thoughtful reflections on this question. Here are some of the highlights: 1) Brown begins by stating an “antinomy.” On the one hand, aesthetic taste does not seem an important concern for Christian theology: “for instance, ‘bad... Read more

Don Richardson and Contextualization

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

Don Richardson’s Peace Child is a classic of modern mission writing. In that book, Richardson tells of his experience among the Sawi people of New Guinea, and how he used their traditional custom of exchanging a “peace child” between warring tribes to explain the gospel to them. In his 1981 sequel, Eternity in Their Hearts , he examined dozens of examples of similar missions experiences, arguing that missionaries must learn to see existing traditions, institutions, and myths as providential preparation... Read more

True and False Arks

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

When the men of Babel organize to build a tower reaching to heaven, they decide to use “tar for mortar” (Gen 11:3; NASB). The Hebrew phrase repeats two different forms of the same root word (CHMR): The word for “tar” is CHEMAR and the word for “mortar” is CHOMER. They make bricks and say the “CHEMAR shall be to them as CHOMAR.” Holladay suggests the translations “bitumen, asphalt” for CHEMAR, and the word is used elsewhere only in Gen 14:10... Read more

Exhortation, June 20

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

According to the traditional church calendar, we are several Sundays into Trinity season. Trinity season begins with Trinity Sunday, which is the first Sunday after Pentecost, and Trinity season stretches through the summer and into the autumn, until the beginning of Advent. It is the longest of the seasons of the church calendar, comprising twenty-some Sundays. Trinity season is sometimes seen as an oddity in the church calendar. The other festivals celebrate the events of redemptive history: Advent and Christmas... Read more

Eucharistic Meditation, June 20

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

Numbers 13:32 Throughout the OT, the land promised to Israel is described as a ?land flowing with milk and honey.?E This is an image of rich abundance, of course, but it is particularly an image of the rich abundance of food. God did not choose a land where Israel would suffer famine, hunger and thirst, but a land that would satisfy them with its fatness. In giving the land, Yahweh gave food and drink to His people with an open... Read more

Huntington and Mexico

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

Enrique Krauze provides some powerful criticisms of Samuel Huntington’s claims about the influence of Mexican immigration on American cultural identity in the June 21 issue of TNR . Huntington argues in his recent book that there is a core American culture, and it is “Anglo-Protestant.” Mexicans, Spanish-speaking and Catholic, threaten that core. But Krauze points out that Protestantism is burgeoning in Mexico: “Today Mexico is 90 percent Catholic, ubt if the trend continues the Catholic population will shrink to 75... Read more

Freud and Theory

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

James Woods perceptively notes that the triumph of theory in literary studies is less the triumph of Marx than the triumph of Freud: “One of the decisive changes that theory effected was to introduce the idea that texts do not know themselves. It is the critic’s business to reveal their repressed anxieties and incoherences. There are no moments of pure innocence anymore. The deconstructionist will use these moments of undecidability, these ‘aporias,’ to demonstrate how the text unconsciously undermines itself.... Read more

On which mountain did Moses receive the Ten Commandments?