Our Religious War

Last updated on: June 27, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Mary Eberstadt doesn’t believe we’re in a war of the religious v. the secular. In an adapted excerpt from her newly-released It’s Dangerous To Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies, she argues that the battle is between “competing faiths: one in the Good Book, and the other in the more newly written figurative book of secularist orthodoxy about the sexual revolution.” The basic premise of the “secular catechism” is that “the sexual revolution—that is, the gradual de-stigmatization of all forms... Read more

Darkness Rebuked

Last updated on: June 24, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Don’t participate in (sugkoinoneo) darkness, Paul says (Ephesians 5:11). Communion with darkness is fruitless, sterile (akarpos). Instead of communing with the works of darkness, instead of joining them in one dead flesh, we are to “expose” the works of darkness. Elegcho, “expose,” can also mean “convict” (John 8:46), a word of the Spirit (John 16:8). Verse 12 makes it clear that “deeds of darkness” are things “done . . . in secret.” These are the things to be rebuked and... Read more

Darkness Rebuked

Last updated on: June 24, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

He Is Not Here

Last updated on: June 24, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Place, writes Robert Pogue Harrison (The Dominion of the Dead), is established by a hic jacet: “here lies” the body of my ancestors. To this the gospel poses a direction challenge: When the women show up at the tomb of Jesus, angels tell them hic non est, He is not here. The empty tomb “points away from hic jacet; that is, from a site marked by its resident dead” (110). As a result, “theologically speaking, the whole earth becomes, for... Read more

Jesus the Teacher

Last updated on: June 23, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

If not unique, Robert Banks’s Reenvisioning Theological Education is a rarity among studies of theological education in the amount of attention he devotes to biblical models of education and training. In reviewing recent literature on efforts to rethink seminary education, he notes again and again that little attention is paid to Scripture. The Bible is rarely treated as normative for theological training. Banks knows that we can’t make a direct transfer from the methods and models used by Paul to... Read more

Jacob Have I Loved

Last updated on: June 23, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

William Johnstone points out in the first volume of his commentary on 1 & 2 Chronicles that the Chronicler’s (C) list of the kings of Edom oddly repeats the phrase “then king so-and-so died and there reigned in his place” seven times. In part, this places greater stress on kingship, but “the reason for its inclusion may be found in the subtle addition to his Genesis source of an echoing phrase after the eighth and last king: ‘Then Hadad died.’... Read more

Tomb Culture

Last updated on: June 23, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In an essay on “The Evangelical Subversion of Myth,” René Girard examines Matthew 23:27, Jesus’s comparison of the Pharisees to whited sepulchers, and Jesus’s condemnation of the Pharisees who are sons of those who kill the prophets. On the last passage, Girard cleverly observes that the Pharisees’ effort to distance themselves from their prophet-murdering forefathers ends up re-enacting the same violence: “in order to demonstrate their noninvolvement in violence, their own intrinsic innocence, the sons condemn the fathers; the original... Read more

Attention Deficit

Last updated on: June 22, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

According to Lily Gurton-Wachter’s Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention, “the first documentation of the disorder we now call Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” is found in “a medical text published in London in 1798.” Scottish physician Alexander Crichton described the “morbid alterations to which attention is subject” and highlighted patients who exhibited an “incapacity of attending with a necessary degree of constancy to any one subject” as well as “an unnatural or morbid sensibility of the nerves, by which... Read more

Ancient Memory

Last updated on: June 22, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Remember the poor,” Paul told the Galatians. But what did that mean? Peter Brown (The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity, 39-40) explains that “For early Christians, as for many other ancient persons, memory was far more than a passive storage space. It implied an act of will. In the ancient world, memory was a tool of social cohesion par excellence. Patrons held clients to them by remembering and rewarding their services. In return, clients... Read more

Ancient Memory

Last updated on: June 22, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

What does 1 Peter say wives can do to win over their unbelieving husbands?