Descartes and the Mass

Last updated on: April 20, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Descartes’s early critics had many qualms about his new philosophy, but for theological critics the central question was how to square his views with the dogma of transubstantiation. Descartes claimed to be a faithful Roman Catholic, but philosophically he was opposed to the hylomorphic theory of matter on which traditional accounts of transubstantiation depended. Descartes had a variety of responses to attacks on his (mainly from Jesuits, who used attacks on Descartes to attack the Jansenists of Port Royal, wrongly... Read more

Coriolanus to Cleopatra

Last updated on: April 20, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Paul Cantor (Shakespeare’s Rome) argues that Shakespeare wrote Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra as companion plays, marking the birth of the Republic and its decadent decline in the early empire. As evidence, he points to overlapping themes and literary features, and notes that there is a political and moral degeneration from the earlier to the later play. There is a great deal of eating and drinking in Antony and Cleopatra (1.2.12-13; 2.7; hereafter A&C) none in Coriolanus (hereafter Cor). Cor... Read more

Death and Resurrection in Acts

Last updated on: April 20, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

MD Goulder argues that death and resurrection is the narrative pattern of Acts (Type and History in Acts). In most cases, there is no actual death. There is near-death, and then deliverance: “The apostolic college, Peter, Paul, in turn go down to the pit: and from the pit they are raised again, the apostolic college, Peter, Paul” (93). Stephen of course does die, but even his death isn’t the end of the story. It is followed directly by a multiply... Read more

Child – Father to the Man?

Last updated on: April 19, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Laurent Fleury’s Sociology of Culture and Cultural Practices is “underpinned” by a conviction that runs counter to the consensus of sociology, especially among those influenced by Pierre Bourdieu. Fleury’s conviction is that “there are no simple, univocal links between attitudes developed in childhood and choices, preferences, and practices deployed in adulthood” (xv). Rather than a process that ends with adolescence or adulthood, “cultural socialization is a continuous, lifelong activity.” He affirms the reality of cultural habitus and admits that socialization... Read more

Feuerbach on Sacraments

Last updated on: April 19, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

“The whole of religion is contained in the Sacraments,” Feuerbach says at the beginning of The Essence of Christianity. That is, “there are . . . no other religious acts than those which are performed in Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.” This being so, Feuerbach claims that “the entire purport and positive result of my work are bathing, eating and drinking,” which is what Baptism and the Supper reduce to when examined through “a faithful, rigid, historical-philosophical analysis of religion.”... Read more

Geography of Mission

Last updated on: April 19, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

MD Goulder (Type and History in Acts) points out that the history recorded in Acts doesn’t follow the Jerusalem-Judea-Samaria-ends of earth pattern that Jesus leads us to expect at the beginning of the book: “The four places are being given in their theological order: the holy city, the holy land, the seceded part of Israel, Gentiledom. Now this would be the natural order for St Luke to tell his story. Historically, however, things had gone slightly differently. The gospel had... Read more

Hearing Voices

Last updated on: April 18, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

John hears several voices as he sees new Jerusalem descend from heaven like a bride. He hears a loud voice “out of the throne” announcing, in third person, that God has pitched His tent among men (Revelation 21:3-4). Then the one seated on the throne speaks: “Behold new I make all things” (v. 5). Then an unidentified voice exhorts John to write the faithful and true words (v. 6). Finally, another unidentified voice announces that “it is done,” identifies himself... Read more

Anti-Priestly Theology

Last updated on: April 18, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Nietzche (AntiChrist) claims that German philosophy is descended from German theology. Kant’s victory is a theological one. Nietzsche’s own position, though, is equally theological, a different one. But not that different, because like Kant he’s a low church Protestant attacking decadent priestly religion. The priest (section 26) is “a parasitical kind of man that thrives at the expense of all healthy forms of life, the priest, misuses the name of God: he calls a condition of society in which the... Read more

Lukan Logic

Last updated on: April 18, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

MD Goulder (Type and History in Acts) summarizes the complaints against Luke’s history of the early church in Acts: “No student can read Acts without dissatisfaction: he would not have written it thus. Why does it end where it ends? Why is so much space devoted to the account of the storm and shipwreck? Why are St Paul’s trials described in such repetitive detail? Why is so rigorous a subdivision imposed that we hear no more of Philip or Peter... Read more

Puritan Modernism

Last updated on: April 15, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

America has a unique architecture, indebted to our unique religious makeup. In a 1982 article, Thomas Beeby notes that the communal experiments of early Puritans, and later of Quakers, Shakers, Moravians, and Pietists provided “paradigms of puritanical Protestant architectural thought” (essay reprinted in The Religious Imagination in Modern and Contemporary Architecture, 13). With no “pre-existent Catholic society” or architecture to reckon with, American architecture could respond to its own religious impulses and its own setting in the new world: “Wilderness... Read more

Who was the last apostle to die?