Philosophical Bible

Last updated on: June 10, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Why isn’t the Hebrew Bible taken seriously as a text of philosophy, ethics, or political thought? That it isn’t is obvious. As Yoram Hazony observes in his The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, his graduate training at Rutgers all but ignored the Bible: “political theory and the history of political ideas were presented as a tradition that began in pre-Socratic Greece, ad proceeded from there to Plato and Aristotle, to the Greek and Roman political schools, to the political thought of... Read more

Philosophical Bible

Last updated on: June 10, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Catholic v. Universal

Last updated on: June 10, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Writing on Catholic education in a 1990 America essay, Walter Ong pushed the discussion of Catholic identity back to the roots: What is the “catholicity” of “Catholic”? “‘Catholic,’” he observed, “is commonly said to mean ‘universal,’ a term from the Latin universalis.” But this doesn’t fit the linguistic history: “If ‘universal’ is the adequate meaning of ‘catholic,’ why did the Latin church, which in its vernacular language had the word universalis, not use this word but rather borrowed from Greek... Read more

Fulfilling the Law

Last updated on: June 9, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

John 8:1-11 is a difficult, controversial passage in all sorts of ways. There are strong text-critical arguments for claiming it’s not part of the original text of John. It would be a convenient absence, because if it’s genuine, the passage raises all sorts of puzzles. The Pharisees who bring the woman seem to be demanding that Torah be carried out; is Jesus’ opposition to their charge imply His opposition to Torah itself? Why, further, does he write on the ground—of... Read more

Fulfilling the Law

Last updated on: June 9, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Outsider Ethics

Last updated on: June 9, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

While Athenian philosophy was in many respects quite distant from the political cosmologies that characterized the great Near Eastern empires,” writes Yoram Hazony (The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture), “it continued to develop their view of man as being essentially a creature of the state that governs him, and of ethics as a discipline that aims to understand how the virtuous individual goes about contributing to the good of this state” (132). On this point, the ethics of the Hebrew Bible... Read more

Catholicity

Last updated on: June 9, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In an 1851 essay on “Catholicism” published in the Mercersburg Review, John Williamson Nevin unpacked the notion that the church is “catholic” or “universal.” He distinguished two ways of understanding the church’s universality—as “all” or as “whole.” If the church is catholic as “all,” then it is an agglomeration of congregations that are prior to the church itself. This is an “abstract” understanding of catholicity, since the universality in view refers to a totality that “exists only in the mind”... Read more

Ben Franklin, Imperialist

Last updated on: June 8, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

T.H. Breen reviews recent books on Ben Franklin at the TLS. Along the way, he summarizes the argument of Carla Mulford’s Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire: “Franklin developed a coherent theory of colonial sovereignty well before the final revolutionary crisis. . . . Franklin concluded that older, mercantilist concepts of empire served the interests neither of the British nor the colonists. He loved the empire, its power and potential, its boasted freedoms. He argued that the vast resources... Read more

Catholic Christ, Catholic Church

Last updated on: June 8, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Christ is strictly catholic,” writes Herman Hoeksema (Reformed Dogmatics, 608). He is “rich unto all that call upon him,” whether Jew or gentile. Christ is the “Lord, rich with salvation for all the nations of the earth.” He is not merely the universal Lord of humanity, but Lord of all: “so catholic, so all-comprehensively universal is our Lord Jesus Christ, that ‘it pleased the Father that in him should all the fullness dwell.’” Because Christ is catholic, so is the... Read more

Paul, Varroist

Last updated on: June 8, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Following Varro, Augustine distinguished three forms of ancient religion: The fabulous religion of the myths, the sophisticated religion of philosophers, and the public religion of the polis. These three categories of ancient religion are evident in Luke’s account of the early church’s missionary encounters. In Philippi (Acts 16) and Thessalonica (Acts 17), Paul is charged with rebellion against Rome; he upsets the political religion of the empire. In Athens, he presents his case to Stoics and Epicureans (among others), while... Read more

What did the Israelites eat in the wilderness for 40 years?