Donne and Sacramental Poetics

Last updated on: April 29, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Sophie Read’s Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England examines six early modern English poets on the assumption that “particularities of belief can be made manifest in the verbal texture of a literary work: that there is an analogy between the rhetorical and theological plans of understanding, and that their relation can be traced quite precisely. The most characteristic figures or tropes in a body of devotional poetry in this period are often used to express a conception... Read more

Bring Us To God

Last updated on: April 29, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Peter tells us that Jesus was the “just” man who suffered for the sins of the “unjust,” and that the purpose of this suffering was to “bring us to God.” William Dalton (Christ’s Proclamation to the Spirits) points out that the verb prosago has technical legal meaning in classical Greek, “where it can mean the bringing of a person before a tribunal, or the presentation of a person at a royal court” (135). This usage is evident in New Testament... Read more

Liturgy and Charity

Last updated on: April 29, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Susan Holman (The Hungry Are Dying) draws on recent scholarship to argue that “food doles, communal religious feasts, public works, or subsidized public entertainment prior to the Christianization of Graeco-Roman culture did not function out of any concern to alleviate poverty per se.” These “public works” or leitourgia sometimes “funded the education of those boys eligible for such training, either by their noble birth or their ability to finance the public obligations that would be expected of them as trained... Read more

Rabbinic Welfare

Last updated on: April 28, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Susan Holman devotes a few pages of her The Hungry Are Dying, a study of “beggars and bishops” in Cappadocia, to a sketch of Rabbinic teaching on almsgiving, drawn from the writings of the Talmudim. The poor appear in three main contexts in rabbinic writing: “First, they are recognized as a distinctly protected economic group by biblical legislation, which acknowledged them as active social agents” (43). This, Holman points out, stands in contrast to the Roman perspective on poverty, which... Read more

Preaching to Spirits

Last updated on: April 28, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Karen Jobes (1 Peter) understates the point when she says that 1 Peter 3 is “more obscure than we might wish,” but she highlights the central point of Peter’s odd claim that Jesus preached to spirits in prison: “(1)Being linked with 3:13-17 by hoti kai (because also, 3:18), the 3:18-22 passage is intended to ground the immediately preceding claim that it is better to suffer for doing good than for doing evil. (2) Even though Christ suffered unjustly to death... Read more

Weber’s Liberal Protestantism

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

Anthony Carroll summarizes his Protestant Modernity in a 2009 article in the Archives of European Sociology. Recognizing that Weber’s theory of secularization “has greatly influenced later social theorists in their accounts of secularisation, rationalisation, and modernisation,” he wanted to set Weber’s theory “within its liberal Protestant heritage.” This is partly a matter of showing that Weber depended on German Protestant biblical and theological scholarship, building, for example, on Wellhausen in his account of ancient Israel and by Rudolf Sohm on... Read more

Weber’s Liberal Protestantism

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

Biblical Terms for “Ritual”

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

English Bibles rarely employ the words “ceremony,” “rite,” or “ritual” to translate biblical terms. The NASB, for example, uses the words “ritual” and “rite” in only three instances, all having to do with the Passover (Exodus 12:25-26; 13:5). The Authorized Version uses the word “ritual” only at Number 9:3. The NIV uses these terms in six passages (Genesis 50:11; Exodus 12:25-26; 13:5; Acts 21:24; Hebrews 9:21), and the Revised Standard Version five times (Exodus 12:24; Number 3:38; John 2:6; Hebrews... Read more

Biblical Terms for “Ritual”

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

Protestant Individualism?

Last updated on: April 26, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In her book on Common Prayer, Ramie Targoff claims that “What emerges in the aftermath of the Reformation is less a triumphant embrace of the individual’s private and individual self than a concerted effort to shape the otherwise uncontrollable and unreliable internal sphere through common acts of devotion” (6). Some early English reformers were afraid of hypocrisy, the “disjunction between the worshipper’s mind and body” but “by the seventeenth century, however, the concerns raised by early reformers . . .... Read more

According to Hebrews, who serves as a copy and shadow of what is in heaven?