Talking Like Grownups

Last updated on: October 9, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Jonathan Franzen begins his NYTBR review of Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation by describing Turkle’s unique place among commentators on technical culture: “She’s a skeptic who was once a believer, a clinical psychologist among the industry shills and the literary hand-wringers, an empiricist among the cherry-picking anecdotalists, a moderate among the extremists, a realist among the fantasists, a humanist but not a Luddite: a grown-up.” As a grownup, Turkle doesn’t approve the infantilization of relationships that technology permits. The “cleaner, less risky, less... Read more

From the Mouth

Last updated on: October 9, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Four times Revelation refers to the sword that comes from the mouth of Jesus, twice at the beginning of the book (1:16; 2:16) and twice at the end (19:15, 21). Jesus’ mouth-sword frames the book, and the four uses hint at His universal conquest: Jesus will extend the reign of His Word to the four corners. No one else has a mouth-sword, but various characters in Revelation have other things coming from their mouths. The basic pattern is: Jesus’ allies... Read more

New Old Christendom

Last updated on: October 8, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

According to John Allen Jr., writing in Crux, the next Christendom in Africa bears some resemblance to the last one – particularly with regard to the role of the Catholic church. African Catholicism has exploded, growing over 6700% during the twentieth century. The largest Catholic seminary in the world is Bigard Memorial Seminary in Nigeria. That growth has fueled a confidence among Africans in the Catholic church, and among Catholics in Africa. The Catholic church has applied for observer status in... Read more

Battle of Har-Magedon

Last updated on: October 8, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Kings gather at a place called “Har-Magedon” for the war of the great day of God pantokrator (Revelation 16:12-16). If we put aside our assumptions about this scene and follow the threads indicated by the text, what can we say about this battle? One clue lies in the identification of the first group of kings as kings “those from the rising of the sun” (ton apo anatoles heliou, v. 12). There’s another reference to the sun in the immediate context,... Read more

Assimilated To What?

Last updated on: October 8, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Leave aside the question of illegal immigrants for a moment. Legal immigration is itself a political and cultural challenge. And one of the central questions is whether or not the newest immigrants – coming from Latin America, Africa, and Asia rather than from Europe – can assimilate to American life. Can they become Americans? In their study of Religion and the New Immigrants, Michael Foley and Dean Hoge observe that the answer to the question about whether immigrants are assimilating to... Read more

Frogs

Last updated on: October 7, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The trinity of dragon, beast, and false prophet “breath” out three demon spirits that look like frogs (Revelation 16:13). Why frogs? Frogs are an Egyptian plague (Exodus 7-8; Psalm 78:45; 105:30). So a plague of frogs keeps us in the exodus-Egypt framework. Frogs are unclean creatures. This is somewhat tricky to determine. They do not meet the requirements for clean land animals, which are typically requirements for mammals. They do not meet the requirements for sea creatures either, since they... Read more

Triune Relations

Last updated on: October 7, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Wesley Hill argues in Paul and the Trinity that recent discussions of Pauline christology are locked into a misleading hierarchical framework in which the main question is whether the Christology is high or low. Hill wonders whether the category of “relationality,” especially “mutual relationality,” so prominent in recent Trinitarian theology and so much eclipsed in New Testament studies, might prove a more fruitful hermeneutical framework. His book is a detailed answer in the affirmative. As he points out, when relationality is... Read more

Learning from Catholicism

Last updated on: October 7, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

“The differences between these two major types of Christianity, at the present time, involve contradictions,” wrote Avery Dulles in The Catholicity of the Church. “Full unity cannot be achieved by convergence alone but only by conversion.” Dulles believed that the necessary conversion could only take place if each church engaged the other: “each ecclesial body must both give and receive the greatest measure of enrichment and correction that it can through mutual witness and dialogue.” Nor surprisingly, Dulles believed Catholics have... Read more

Structure and Meaning in Revelation 16

Last updated on: October 6, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Revelation 16:12-16 is a chiasm, and recognizing that fact will illuminate the contents of the passage. A. Sixth bowl poured on Euphrates. B. River dried up for kings from the sunrising. C. Three frogs from mouths of dragon, beast, false prophet. D. Frog are demons performing signs. C’. Kings of oikoumene gathered. B’. Behold I am coming like thief. A’. They gathered to one place. This helps to specify who is who in the passage. The B sections match each other.... Read more

The Self-Contradictions of Sam Harris

Last updated on: October 6, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his TLS review of Sam Harris’s Waking Up, John Cottingham summarizes Harris’s worldview: “a reality where there are no true substances and there is ultimately nothing but an impersonal flux of conditions that arise and pass away.” Harris is opposed to religion but in favor of spirituality, and offers spiritual experience as evidence of his metaphysics. Once he does this, though, “Harris has left himself no justification for dismissing those countless theists, whose own spiritual experience has, by contrast, seemed... Read more