How To Create Church Fights

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

Denominational Christianity is a safety-valve. When things get too hot in a congregation, one or the other party leaves and starts its own church. Pressure reduces. Over time, the divided parties might even make up after a fashion. Denominational Christianity seems a peace treaty. Lesslie Newbigin, a leader in the creation of the reunited Church of South India (CSI), concedes the point (Reunion of the Church). Under that scheme, there was to be only one congregation in each town and... Read more

First Church of the Inner Ring

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

“The danger inherent in all the (necessary) work of theological statement is that it may go beyond the task of protecting the gospel and become a series of additions to the gospel,” writes Lesslie Newbigin (The Reunion of the Church, 16). Denominations add to this inherent danger because “each group tends to accentuate the matters on which it is divided from the others and which justify its continued existence as a separate group. The force of its group egotism is... Read more

Converting Conversion

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

Evangelicalism, writes Andrew Wall, is a “protest movement,” one of many illustrious such movements in the history of Christianity, beginning with St. Anthony’s retreat into the desert. As protest, “Evangelical faith is about inward religion as distinct from formal, real Christianity as distinct from nominal. In other words, the evangelicalism of the [19th century] takes its identity from protest, and in effect from nominal Christianity. Evangelical religion presupposes Christendom, Christian civil society” (The Missionary Movement in Christian History, 82-3). A... Read more

Crisis of Manhood

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

One of the many illuminating observations in Philipp Blom’s Fracture is his observation that the early 20th century witnessed a massive crisis of manhood. He sees signs of it already in pre-World War I Europe (covered in Blom’s The Vertigo Years) as the rise of machinery and factory labor robbed men of the nobility and honor they had in traditional societies. They were reduced to doing repetitive women’s work. City life left them little scope to be masculine. And then women added insult... Read more

The Scope of Revelation

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

In the first volume of his Reformed Dogmatics (435-6), Herman Bavinck notes that the final end of everything is “God Himself,” since “he can never come to an end in creation but can only rest in himself.” Revelation’s purpose is consistent with this overall aim. Thus “the object of revelation cannot only be to teach human beings, to illuminate their intellects (rationalism), or to prompt them to practice virtue (moralism), or to arouse religious sensations in them (mysticism). God’s aim in... Read more

Follow Your Heart?

Last updated on: August 28, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Each Israelite is commanded to fix a tassel at each of the four corners of his or her garments (Numbers 15:37-41). Within each tassel is a cord of blue. As Jacob Milgrom and others have argued, that cord is wool, which means that each Israelite wears slightly mixed clothing, which is holy clothing. Verses 39-40 explain the rational for the tassel: A. It will be a tassel and you shall see it B. and you shall remember all the commandments... Read more

How Missions Has Changed

Last updated on: August 28, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Writing in 1961 (Is Christ Divided?), Lesslie Newbigin reflects on the use of the phrase “foreign missions.” He understands why some Christians don’t like the phrase: “It has overtones of the nineteenth century, of paternalism and colonialism.” And he is well aware that the terrain of the Christian world has changed dramatically (32). Now foreign missions isn’t “the white man going from his advanced civilization to under-developed areas as the man with the ‘know how.’” It is instead “a matter... Read more

Call the Midwife

Last updated on: August 28, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Over at The Federalist, Joy Pullmann summarizes the case in favor of expanding opportunities for midwives to offer their unique style of woman-oriented health care: “First, it’s low-cost. Second, it creates more flexible health-care arrangements for both providers and clients that greatly increase satisfaction and positive health outcomes. Third, it has the potential to ‘disrupt’ the woman’s health-care industry and thus improve women’s health-care as a whole, with potential also to improve basic health care for everyone. Fourth, the ethos of midwifery... Read more

Unity and Public Theology

Last updated on: August 28, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a critical assessment of the ecumenical movement published in 1957, evangelical J. Marcellus Kik assessed the reasons given for pursuing unity in the church. One, he says, is that “the world situation presents a powerful incentive to act with Christian unity,” because, it is argued, “what the many denominations cannot accomplish in separate existence, a world-wide church with a central organization could accomplish” (Ecumenism and the Evangelical, 4). Kik isn’t convinced: “they do not spell out how such will... Read more

The Christian Revolution

Last updated on: August 27, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Writing in 1961 (Is Christ Divided?), Lesslie Newbigin observed that while it is “common to say that we live in an age of revolutionary change,” it is uncommon “for Christians to welcome this fact.” Newbigin thinks that’s a mistake: “we should welcome it—not merely because of the challenge which it offers to any man of faith and courage, but because it is precisely what our Lord led us to expect.” He came to cast fire to the earth: “Did anyone... Read more