False Prophet

Last updated on: April 21, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The New Testament contains a number of warnings about false prophets (pseudoprophetes), often in “apocalyptic” contexts (Matthew 24:11, 24; Mark 13:22; 2 Peter 2:1; 1 John 4:1). The link between false prophecy and crisis goes back to Jeremiah. As the Babylonian threat against Judah rises, false prophets appear, assuring the people of Jerusalem and Judah that they have nothing to fear, that the Lord will beat back Nebuchadnezzar as he beat back the Assyrians, and that the city will not... Read more

The Failure of Gay Marriage

Last updated on: April 20, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a 2009 piece in The Weekly Standard, Sam Schulman argues that gay marriage replicates “a very limited, very modern, and very culture-bound version of marriage. Gay advocates have chosen wisely in this. They are replicating what we might call the ‘romantic marriage,’ a kind of marriage that is chosen, determined, and defined by the couple that enters into it.” This isn’t what marriage has been through most of human history. Instead, marriage has taken the particular shape it has because... Read more

Reckoning Time in Genesis

Last updated on: April 20, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Jeffery Leonard ends a Review of Biblical Literature (4/15) review of BC Hodge’s Revisiting the Days of Genesis with this observation: “While the author does a workmanlike job of demonstrating how various numbers in Gen 1–11 could be interpreted symbolically, it is not at all clear to me that the biblical authors necessarily intended that these numbers should be interpreted in this fashion. It seems just as likely to me, for example, that the ancient Yahwist believed there was a flood... Read more

Stabilized Passion

Last updated on: April 20, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his contribution to Radical Secularization, John Milbank contests Habermas’s Kantian notion of public reason, arguing that reason is not “self-grounded” but “inseparable from our affective and elective intuitions concerning the nature of reality. Reason is always conjoined with feeling and can even be considered to be a reflexive intensification of feeling: passion become more distanced and yet more constant and stable.” This isn’t subjectivism because feeling, in contrast to reason which can trend solipsistic, “is always feeling of or about.”... Read more

A Triad of Trinities

Last updated on: April 20, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Revelation 12-13 describe draconian and bestial attacks on the saints. The enemies form a triad. Indeed, they form a double triad. First, dragon, sea beast, land beast. Then: Sea beast, land beast, image of the beast. Alternatively, we can see four: Dragon, sea beast, land beast, image of the beast. Two triads and a quartet: A triad of triads (plus one). The correspondences with the Trinity work in each of these schemes. The dragon is the Father who gives authority... Read more

Spirituality of Maps

Last updated on: April 17, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Lisa Deam’s A World Transformed is an engaging, meditative study of what she calls the “spirituality of medieval maps.” Maps, she argues, are never neutral. They “show what their users want and need to believe about the world. They allow us to daydream, to plot and scheme, to envision our future. They help us take journeys, both real and imagined. Maps are belief systems in miniature” (19). Modern maps elide worldview. Not medieval maps, which, whatever the makers thought about the... Read more

Head and Body

Last updated on: April 17, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Rowan Greer’s One Path for All is a study of Gregory of Nyssa’s writings on the Christian life. It includes a dozen selections from Gregory’s works, and then a series of essays on the pathway of pilgrimage and battle that every baptized person must, along with all the baptized, walk. Greer is keen to show that for Gregory the life of the Christian is a life in community, and he explains that Gregory puts the point in rather startling terms: “Since... Read more

Renewing the Mainline

Last updated on: April 17, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Ronald Byars knows that mainline churches are in trouble, and in Finding Our Balance, he lays out a program for renewal. Much depends on restoring a positive notion of authority and a bounded orthodoxy, since “every community, including the ecumenical church, needs boundaries” (46). Doctrinal renewal is not enough, though, and Byars’s program for renewing the mainline dovetails with efforts to renew Evangelicalism in his discussion of the anti-ritual bias of Protestantism. Worship is reduced to “personal devotional exercises in public,”... Read more

Literary Patterns in Genesis

Last updated on: April 17, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

It’s not clear how much rethinking Gordon Wenham has done to produce his Rethinking Genesis 1-11. After all, Wenham has been writing illuminating commentary about the early chapters of Genesis for a long time. Re-thought or not, his new little book contains some treasures. He observes the inversion of Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning created God the heavens and the earth”) and 2:1-3 (“heavens and earth were finished . . . God finished . . . God rested from all his... Read more

Epistemo-technics

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

In his Organizing Enlightenment, Chad Wellmon explains how the modern research university was a response to a crisis of “information overload.” The Enlightenment saw an explosion of new knowledge and research. The Enlightenment empire of erudition was a bookish empire. Philosophes imagined they could provide a unified account of knowledge by “capturing it in print” (10) – by capturing everything in print, in encyclopediae, dictionaries, taxonomies, comprehensive philosophical systems. Some Enlightenment thinkers were skeptical of the fetishization of the book (as... Read more