Singing the Apocalypse

Last updated on: December 2, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Revelation seems to be the province of fundamentalists, dispensationalists, popapocalyptics. It’s far too cartoonish, stark, violent, demanding to be at home in the mainline. Craig Koester (Revelation and the End of All Things) points out that mainline churches actually hear very little of the Apocalypse in church. The Revised Common Lectionary virtually ignores the book: “Although the book is twenty-two chapters long, the lectionary selects only six short passages to be read. These include the opening and concluding greetings from God... Read more

Would you sacrifice yourself for Iraq?

Last updated on: December 2, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Why do we talk about patriotism in religious terms? asks Ivan Strenski (in a Library of Social Science essay): “For a student of religion what strikes one as odd is that we name the act of giving up one’s life for the sake of one’s nation, as a ‘sacrifice.’ Why the silent appeal to religious rituals? Why do we talk about such a soldier’s death in the service of their nation as if it were no different than Abraham standing, knife... Read more

Mapping Jane Austen

Last updated on: December 1, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

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Janine Barchas (Matters of Fact in Jane Austen) says that Austen’s world had a nascent celebrity culture. Baronets were well known; court scandals made news. There was an 18th-century equivalent of the National Inquirer and paparazzi. Austen knew this world, and she makes references to it in her novels. She is not the ahistorical, isolated spinster of legend. She was engaged with the celebrity culture of her time. Austen’s attention to detail is legendary, and the legend is genuine in... Read more

Conceit of Humanitarianism

Last updated on: December 1, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

You get the gist of Rajan Menon’s argument from the title of his forthcoming book: The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention. The position he opposes is based on the assumption that the end of the Cold War fundamentally altered geopolitical conditions, and that our contemporary interconnected world is converging toward a new notion of sovereignty in which nations are legitimated not by power but by their conformity to international norms. Menon admits that realism doesn’t solve all our problems, but he thinks... Read more

God the Last Thing

Last updated on: December 1, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

God only speaks twice directly to the reader in Revelation, Craig Koester points out (Revelation and the End of All Things, 51). He says the same thing both times: “I am the Alpha and the Omega . . . who is and who was and who comes, the Almighty: (1:8; 21:5-8). It makes a neat inclusio around the book as a whole, an inclusio that is about inclusio, the divine inclusio that encloses the chaism of human history. Koester finds... Read more

Materialist Idolatry

Last updated on: November 30, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Nearly all our terms for immaterial concepts were originally terms for material objects. Words for “spirit” originally meant “breath” or “wind”; we use “conceive” to refer to a mental act, but it originally signified grasping with the hand (42). That has led, Owen Barfield wrote (History, Guilt, and Habit) to the mistaken conclusion that the terms had “only a material reference, or, if you like, only a ‘literal’ meaning” (42). That, Barfield says, is the sin of commission. the sin... Read more

Abraham in Shakespeare

Last updated on: November 30, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Ken Jackson’s Shakespeare & Abraham is not, he says, “a traditional study of literary borrowing or influence that primarily seeks to link Genesis 22 and Shakespeare via philological evidence.” He does note verbal echoes and allusions (Shakespeare’s use of the Abrahamic “Here I am” at critical moments in some plays), but he’s more interested in how Shakespeare uses the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac to think with: “the real influence of Genesis 22 and its interpretive tradition is seen in... Read more

Liberalism’s Dilemma

Last updated on: November 30, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In The Myth of Liberalism, John Safranek observes that recent Supreme Court decisions identify freedom with autonomy: “both restrain the government from interfering with an individual’s personal and self-defining decisions” (109). As the majority said in Casey, the right to self-definition is “at the heart of liberty,” such that marriage, procreation, family relationships “involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by... Read more

Advent’s Spirit of Sonship

Last updated on: November 25, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Luke 1 is Trinitarianly odd. Our creeds, growing out of Matthew 28:18-20 and other biblical texts, speak of the order of the Trinity as “Father, Son, Spirit.” That reflects the order of the economy: The Father does send the Son; and then the Son ascends to heaven, and sends the Spirit. The order in history is Father, Son, Spirit. Luke 1 suggests that it is equally correct to say “Father, Spirit, Son,” and this is a more dominant Trinitarian pattern in... Read more

Being in Gratitude

Last updated on: November 25, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Barth (Church Dogmatics, 3.2, section 44) discusses gratitude under the heading of “man as a creature of God,” but creatureliness needs to be seen in a particular way. Man is summoned by the word of grace, by God’s address and affirmation of man. We are “called into life by the Word of God” (175), which is a word of grace. Thanks is the human answer to that word, gratias in response to grace. We have, Barth says, our “being in gratitude.” Gratitude is... Read more

What event led to the great flood in Genesis?