Laughing Last

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

In a chapter on “How to Be Theologically Funny,” Stanley Hauerwas (The Work of Theology) states his opinion that Barth was “‘naturally’ funny,” but immediately adds that this doesn’t really capture the deep role that humor plays in Barth: “his humor was also a reflection of the character of his theology” (244). In his Ethics, unpublished during his lifetime, Barth “grounded humor in the eschatological character of the Christian faith, which means that it is incumbent on Christians to refuse... Read more

Americanization and Reunion

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

American church history is largely a story of division, wrote Robert Lee is a contribution to the 1963 collection, The Challenge of Reunion. In the early twentieth century, that began to change as American churches became “astir with a new spirit of unity and cooperation” (138). He lists 14 intra-denominational unions between 1906 and 1960, and another 5 trans-denominational unions (141-2). What happened? He doesn’t discount theological or spiritual causes, but focuses attention on cultural and social factors. A key one,... Read more

Doctrinal Indifference?

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

More conservative Christians have often charged that ecumenically-minded churches and theologians are indifferent to doctrine, aiming for a LCD theology. Ecumenical theologian James Wagner (in the 1963 collection The Challenge to Reunion) argues that the precise opposite is true: “there is probably no group within the Christian fellowship throughout the world which takes Christian doctrine in general, distinctive doctrines of the denominational and confessional families in particular, more seriously than those who are interested in Christian union. Their position is, not... Read more

Agents of Recreation

Last updated on: August 26, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The descendants of Levi constitute three sub-tribes in Israel: the Gershonites, the Kohathites, and the Merarites. Each has a specific role to play in the dismantling and re-erection of the wilderness tabernacle. The Gershonites are in charges of the coverings and screens, the Kohathites with the interior furnishings, and the Merarites for the wooden frames and pillars and the metal sockets (Numbers 3:21-37). When the tabernacle is set up, the Merarites form, the Gershonites cover, and the Kohathites fill. When... Read more

Harvesting Fruit

Last updated on: August 26, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Walter Kasper’s Harvesting the Fruits reports on various bi-lateral ecumenical dialogues between Catholics and other traditions—Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed and Methodist. Kasper doesn’t pretend that consensus has been achieved, but his little book summarizes the remarkable results of the past several decades. The fruits are healthy in the main. Catholics and Anglicans “agree that the primary authority for all Christians is Jesus Christ himself. . . . To follow Christ is to be set under the authority of Christ. The authority of... Read more

American Greatness

Last updated on: August 26, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

To listen to Trump, America is in trouble because we haven’t been adequately looking after our own interests. To make America great means to put American interests first. Which raises a question: Is putting America first the way we became great in the first place? Might America’s greatness instead have had something to do with the generosity and hospitality of the American people, philanthropists, institutions—our missionaries and businessmen and our military? Might American greatness be somehow related to the Puritan... Read more

Impassibility

Last updated on: August 26, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

John Peckham devotes a long chapter of his The Love of God to the question of divine emotions, the impassibility question. He emphasizes the need to “maintain the Creator/creature distinction, divine transcendence, ontological invulnerability, omnipotence, omniscience and the fact that God is not involuntarily vulnerable. . . . God is not essentially passible or vulnerable in relation to the world. . . . God need not have created any world, and thus God’s passibility in relation to the world is voluntary,... Read more

Losing God’s Love

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

John C. Peckham addresses the long-standing question of whether God’s love is conditional or unconditional in his recent The Love of God: A Canonical Model. Peckham doesn’t think that either is a good summary of the whole biblical picture. He prefers to talk about the “foreconditionality” of God’s love, and the reciprocal nature of God’s love. As foreconditional, God’s love is prior to all human response. God’s love initiates all love (200): “Humans would not exist, let along be beneficiaries of... Read more

The Hero of Israel

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

Most studies of the divine warrior theme in the Old Testament are poetic or comparative. Charlie Trimm argues in “YHWH Fights for Them!” that these studies are too limited; brief poems need the enrichment and complexity of longer narrative treatments. His thorough, workmanlike monograph examines the theme in Exodus 1-15. That passage ends with one of the great divine warrior poems of the Bible, the Song of the Sea, but Trimm shows how that poem is the climax of a long... Read more

Picturing Apocalypse

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

Picturing the Apocalypse by Natasha and Anthony O’Hear is a wide-ranging study of artistic depictions of the book of Revelation. The introduction is a brief but well-informed survey of the interpretation and use of the apocalypse. Each chapter focuses on one portion or image of the apocalypse – the Lamb, the four horseman, the whore of Babylon, the new Jerusalem – and, after a summary and brief analysis of the biblical text, examines artists’ renderings from middle ages through the... Read more