Simplicity and Divine Properties

Last updated on: March 8, 2018 at 5:04 am By Peter Leithart

William Mann has argued that when medievals identify God with His attributes, they identify Him with “property instances,” specific individuals in a relationship of instantiation with the universals that they instantiate. Jeffrey Brower (“Making Sense of Divine Simplicity,” Faith and Philosophy 25: 1 [2008]: 3-30) explains, “As Mann sees it, therefore, we must distinguish between two very different kinds of property-abstract universals such as goodness, power, and wisdom, and concrete individual properties such as God’s goodness, God’s power, and God’s wisdom,... Read more

Model Nation

Last updated on: March 8, 2018 at 5:03 am By Peter Leithart

Robert Tombs (The English and Their History) observes that many intellectuals have pondered the character of nations for the past two centuries, asking “whether nations are ancient or modern phenomena; whether they have some organic existence as cultural, genetic or geographical entities; whether they are political and ideological fabrications; or indeed various mixtures of these.” Tombs takes the position that “most nations and their shared identities are modern creations, the products of literacy, urbanization, and state-led cultural and political unification.”... Read more

Peircean Trinity

Last updated on: March 7, 2018 at 8:12 pm By Peter Leithart

Andrew Robinson (God and the World of Signs) cannot prove that C.S. Peirce drew inspiration for his semiotic pattern of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness from Trinitarian theology. But Robinson is struck by the parallels between Peircean semiotics and Trinitarian theology. For starters, he points to similarities between Athanasius’ paradigms of origin and supplementation (the sun cannot exist with its radiance; a spring cannot be a spring without a supplemental flow) and Peirce’s conception of the logical necessity of First to... Read more

Against Democracy

Last updated on: March 7, 2018 at 8:06 pm By Peter Leithart

John Stuart Mill hoped (in Jason Brennan’s summary) “that getting people involved in politics would make them smarter, more concerned about the common good, better educated, and nobler. He hoped getting a factory worker to think about politics would be like getting a fish to discover there’s a world outside the ocean. Mill hoped political involvement would harden our minds yet soften our hearts. He hoped that political engagement would cause us to look beyond our immediate interests and instead... Read more

Baptists Are Right, Almost

Last updated on: March 7, 2018 at 1:31 am By Peter Leithart

Several essays in the book, Believer’s Baptism, observe the inconsistencies in paedobaptist defenses of infant baptism. In the introduction, editors Thomas Schreiner and Shawn D. Wright focus on the issue of apostasy. If the warning passages in, say, Hebrews are real threats to people within the covenant community, then “some who have the law written on their heart and who have received the forgiveness of sins (Heb 10:16-18) are not truly forgiven.” This position puts “a wedge between those who are... Read more

Sacrificial Politics

Last updated on: March 6, 2018 at 5:29 am By Peter Leithart

Gatherings of the ancient Athenian citizen assembly began with the sacrifice of a pig and the sprinkling of blood to consecrate a sacred space. When a Roman emperor wanted to discover the future, he sacrificed an animal and dispatched a specialist to read the entrails. It’s been a long time since sacrifice was so intimately connected to political life, and, as I argued in Defending Constantine, we have Constantine to thank for that. A number of recent writers, however, have... Read more

Allegories of the Song

Last updated on: March 6, 2018 at 5:28 am By Peter Leithart

A few passages from premodern allegorical readings of the Song of Songs. The first set comes from the Jewish commentator Shlomo Yitzchaki, known as Rashi; the second from Nicholas of Lyra. Of “Solomon” in the Song, Rashi writes: “Every Solomon (for they were at a loss to explain why Scripture did not mention his father, as it did in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes) mentioned in the Song of Songs is sacred (refers to God), the King to Whom peace belongs.” He interprets... Read more

Structure in 2 Chronicles 22-24

Last updated on: February 28, 2018 at 9:39 pm By Peter Leithart

The Chronicler recounts Joash’s reign over several chapters, from 2 Chronicles 22:10 through the end of chapter 24. The text is chiastically structured: A. Conspiracy to coronate Joash, 22:20-23:11 B. Death of Athaliah, 23:12-15 C. Covenant renewal, 23:16-21 C’. Joash repairs the house, 24:1-14 B’. Death of Jehoiada and Zechariah, 24:15-22 A’. Conspiracy against Joash, 24:23-27 The corresponding sections are linked verbally and conceptually, as follows: A/A’: While Athaliah is destroying the royal seed, Jehoshabeath hides Joash in an “inner... Read more

Does Genesis 1 Teach Science?

Last updated on: March 2, 2018 at 1:52 am By Peter Leithart

John Walton insists that Genesis doesn’t “attempt to address cosmology in modern terms or address modern questions. The Israelites received no revelation to update their ‘scientific’ understanding of the cosmos.” Then too: “Throughout the entire Bible, there is not a single instance in which God revealed to Israel a science beyond their own culture. No passage offers a scientific perspective that was not common to the Old World science of antiquity.” John Lennox (Seven Days That Divide the World, 139-41),... Read more

Arming the Resistance

Last updated on: March 2, 2018 at 1:42 am By Peter Leithart

In Policing America’s Empire, Alfred McCoy spells out the analogies between America’s intervention in the Philippines at the beginning of the 20th century and our invasion of Iraq at the end. He thinks the comparison is most illuminating when we highlight the differences between the two: “The spectacular capture of the defeated heads of state, Emilio Aguinaldo in 1901 and Saddam Hussein in 2003, were both successful covert operations that momentarily stilled U.S. domestic dissent. There the similarities end. In... Read more