Levitical Priesthood

Last updated on: January 5, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

“Despite the central role which the priesthood played in Israel’s life and worship,” writes Nicholas Haydock (The Theology of the Levitical Priesthood), it has only a small role in “the majority of Old Testament theologies” (xii). This neglect is partly due to the influence of Wellhausen’s documentary thesis, which treated the priestly literature as late, legalistic, and inferior. Wellhausen’s thesis has been proven false on a number of central counts, and in this new setting Haydock has been inspired by... Read more

Democracy and Mixed Government

Last updated on: January 5, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a lively exchange with Eugene McCarraher, John Milbank summarizes his views on democracy. Like Chesterton, he is a defender of the democracy of the dead, and he insists that this is not simply “a defense of the given and an assault on the present.” That is, he claims, “primarily because we never live in the present, but always in the continuous passage from the past to the future. Thus any revolutionary claim, like that of Paine, to represent only... Read more

First Resurrection

Last updated on: January 5, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Martyrs share in Jesus’ suffering and death. Martyrs also come to life as Jesus did. This is what John calls the “first resurrection” (Revelation 20:5). That is the argument presented by GB Caird (Revelation of St. John the Divine, 255). Jesus’ resurrection, he argues, “had a double sequel, in heaven and on earth: for in heaven he sat down beside his Father on his throne (iii.21), and on earth he began a new activity, unbounded by time and space, walking... Read more

Ringing the Changes

Last updated on: January 4, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

JT Fraser begins one of his essays in Time and Time Again with this lovely sketch of a musical cosmology: “The noble English art of change ringing consists of the ringing of a set of bells of different pitches, according to sequences that follow stable mathematical patterns. A set of rings, so ordered, is called a change. The maximum number of changes possible with a given set of bells is called a peal. When the changes employ five bells, a peal... Read more

Didactic Poetry

Last updated on: January 4, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his introduction to Scott Cairns’s collection, Slow Pilgrim, Gregory Wolfe recounts Cairns’s development as a poet. He grew up “within a powerful religious subculture that splits the spirit off from the letter, reducing faith to didactic legalism. These fellow religionists of his youth loved nothing better than to turn Christianity into a set of moral propositions to be brought down like so many sledgehammers upon the unrighteous” (xx). Encountering the literary elite, Cairns found “a throng of writers who seem... Read more

Seconds

Last updated on: January 4, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

There are a number of “seconds” in the book of Revelation. References to the “second death” surround the book (2:11; 20:6, 14; 21:8), and there is a second seal (6:3), a second woe (11:14), and several second angels (8:8; 14:8; 16:3). The living creatures are enumerated, the lion first, the ox second, the man third, the eagle fourth. They speak in order as the seals are opened, enumerated as first, second, third, fourth. That might provide a clue to the... Read more

Time, Curse or Gift?

Last updated on: December 31, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

New Year’s Day makes on reflective, at least about the past year, perhaps about life, perhaps, more broadly, about time itself. Many view time as a curse. Some see it as a curse because of missed chances. As one day or year moves on to the next, all we can see are the missed opportunities of the previous year, missed opportunities that will never come again. If only we’d stuck with that job or stayed in school, if only we’d... Read more

Jews, Muslims, Christians

Last updated on: December 24, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his Washington Post piece about the Wheaton College controversy, Miroslav Volf equates Christian positions on Islam to Christian views of Judaism: “Christian theologians neither insisted that they worship a different God than Jews nor did they accuse Jews of idolatry. That’s a step that would have been easy to make, for if Jews don’t worship the same God as the Christians, then they worship the false God and, therefore, are idolaters. Instead of rejecting the God of the Jews, Christians... Read more

The Harvest

Last updated on: December 24, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

GB Caird (The Revelation of St John the Divine) has a superb discussion of the harvest scene at the end of Revelation 14. He takes it not as a depiction of horrific judgment but rather as the harvest of the saints in martyrdom. He points out that Jesus predicted that the coming of the Son of Man would be the moment when “He will send out his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of... Read more

Lordly Obedience

Last updated on: December 24, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Paraphrased/quoted from Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4.1, pp. 185ff. In the incarnation, the eternal Son of God makes His way into a far country, and takes on the form of a servant. “But the incarnation, the taking of the form of the servant, means not only that God becomes a creature, a man. It means also that He gives Himself up to man’s rebellion against God, placing Himself under the judgment under which man has fallen in his rebellion, under the... Read more

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