Belief in the Academy

Last updated on: October 16, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a spirited reply to Philip Davies’ Whose Bible Is It Anyway?, Francis Watson takes aim at Davies “call for a strict separation between theological and academic modes of biblical interpretation” (3). Davies complains that believers study the Bible according to an insider approach (emic), while academic scholarship requires an outsider approach (etic). When this separation is not observed, the academic study of the Bible becomes an “impure mixture” (Watson’s phrase) that must be expelled from the “sacred space” (Watson again)... Read more

Circles from the Sky

Last updated on: October 16, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

When the seventh bowl is poured out on the air, the world collapses. The throne of God comes to earth, flashing and thundering and shaking the earth until everything that cannot stand collapses. Cities fall, islands run away, mountains disappear. And hailstones weighing a talent (talantiaia) fall to earth (Revelation 16:17-21). English translations will tell you that the hailstones are “one hundred pounds each,” which is accurate, but the Greek wording indicates a different unit of measure – a talent.... Read more

The Happening

Last updated on: October 16, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Revelation begins (1:1, 19) with the announcement that God showed His bondservants what will soon “happen” or “become” (ginomai). It ends on the same note (22:6). What is it that happens? Judging from the scattered twenty-six uses of the verb ginomai, the happening that God unveils is the happening concentrated in chapter 16. Other things are said to happen or become: the sun turns black and the moon turns red (6:12); the angel at the altar throws coals to the... Read more

Helping Without Hurting

Last updated on: October 15, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert’s Helping Without Hurting in Church Benevolence is a handbook to help churches give aid to low-income people. It explains how to create a policy and philosophy of benevolence, how to build the church’s capacity, and offers training scenarios, questionnaires and lots of lists. It truly is what it purports to be, a “practical guide” for churches. But the practical guide is shaped by fundamental theological convictions. When defining poverty, the authors refuse to define it in... Read more

Philosophical Luther

Last updated on: October 15, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Brian Gregor’s A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross isn’t “a specifically Lutheran anthropology,” but Gregor does think Luther “demands philosophical attention.” Luther influenced Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, and these influenced Ricoeur and Bonhoeffer. Post-Heideggerian Lutheran theology also, of course, bears the marks of Luther’s influence (8-9). Gregor’s book is “attuned to those themes in Luther that have been significant in shaping these thinkers: the human being as addressed and constituted by a prior word, as standing ek-statically outside itself in... Read more

Infant Faith

Last updated on: October 15, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

According to Kimberly Hope Belcher (Efficacious Engagement, 77), “Augustine seems to have been the first commentator on baptism to seriously consider whether the rites of initiation he knew, which were used for both adults and children, applied equally well to both.” He concluded that they did apply, and this was crucial to Augustine’s arguments concerning original sin: If infants were innocent, why would they need to go through the liberating bath of baptism? Augustine went further, though, to argue that... Read more

Austen’s Silent Characters

Last updated on: October 15, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Jane Austen “did things with characerisation, with dialogue, with English sentences, that had never been done before,” writes John Mullan in What Matters in Jane Austen? (p. 2). That she wrote novels is not surprising. That she wrote in such utter isolation is more so. That she wrote with such audacity is, Mullan argues, “miraculous”: “There was something miraculous about the fact that she wrote novels whose narrative sophistication and brilliance of dialogue were unprecedented in English fiction. She introduced free... Read more

What We Get From Worship

Last updated on: October 14, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

It is often said that we come to worship to give and not to receive. That is a dangerous half-truth. Praise, thanks, adoration are all part of worship, of course, and God delights in our praise. But in worship as in all of life, we have nothing to give unless we have first received. We give praise to God because He first gives gifts to us, and our gifts to Him are simply an Amen to His gifts to us.... Read more

Dostoevsky’s Theology

Last updated on: October 14, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Pulling together the important “content” of Rowan Williams’s profound, masterful 2008 study of Dostoevsky inevitably distorts, since much of the book consists of sensitive readings of Dostoevskian texts. Williams begins with a text, analyzing a confession from an 1854 letter: “if someone were to prove to me that Christ was outside the truth . . . then I should choose to stay with Christ rather than with the truth.” Does this declaration unveil unacknowledged Miltonic sympathy with the devil? Is he claiming... Read more

Can Civil Society Fix Us?

Last updated on: October 14, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

“Civil society” typically refers to private and voluntary institutions distinct from both the bureaucracies of the nation-state and the economic institutions of the market. It includes “mediating institutions” like the family, the Moose Lodge, charities, churches, unions, the Chamber of Commerce, educational institutions, United Way, neighborhoods, softball teams, professional associations, the whole complex web of formal and informal associations in which modern Americans and Europeans spend much of their non-working lives. Civil society has long been a talismanic theme among... Read more