Inevitable Denominations?

Last updated on: April 14, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Rex Koivisto (One Lord, One Faith) argues that the problem of church unity has less to do with denominational structures and more to do with a sectarian spirit. Denominations weren’t sectarian in origins, but an attempt to retain catholicity in a diverse theological setting. All true, but his argument that “denominations will occur inevitably” (109) doesn’t follow. When a group “develops enough of a sense of mission to support a church plant and to retain reciprocal fellowship with the daughter... Read more

Springs and Rivers

Last updated on: April 13, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Revelation is addressed to the church in a wilderness, a generation-long period between Jesus’ exaltation and the fall of Jerusalem. Like Israel in the wilderness, the church needs to find sources of fresh, life-giving water. Fresh water is promised (7:17) and eventually given (21:5-6; 22:1, 17), but in between unpolluted rivers and springs are hard to come by. The star Wormwood turns a third of the springs and rivers into wormwood (8:10-11), bitter as the waters of Marah. The serpent... Read more

The Marriage Pledge

Last updated on: April 13, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The debate over the marriage pledge has died down, but it shouldn’t be dismissed. It still has a useful function, a clarifying function. Those who signed the marriage pledge were refusing to sign state marriage licenses. The point behind the pledge was to distinguish between what the law now calls “marriage” and what the church has always called, and must continue to call “marriage.” It’s a statement that what the law now calls “marriage” isn’t, by Christian definition, because “in the... Read more

Dangerous Tradition

Last updated on: April 13, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Rex Koivisto argues (One Lord, One Faith, 155-6) that all churches have traditions, including supposedly Bible-only Evangelicals. All traditions can harden into harmful habits, but Koivisto thinks that this danger is particularly threatening among Evangelicals who claim to be free of tradition. “The danger . . . comes not from having traditions, but from being unable to distinguish our traditions from the clear teachings of Scripture.” For such supposedly traditionless Evangelicals, “all of our practices are perceived to have come... Read more

Church as Sacred Place

Last updated on: April 13, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Some of the churches that Duncan Stroik discusses in The Church Building as Sacred Place sound and look like wretched spaces. The parish church in Tor Tre Teste, thirty miles outside central Rome, for instance, is designed to disorient and decenter: “The nave is conceived as an asymmetrical space in which every element that might bring harmony is bisected or cut into by some other object. The vertical south wall of paneled wood contrasts with the curving concrete north wall that... Read more

Pascalian Politics

Last updated on: April 10, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Paul Griffiths (Decreation) argues that “quietism” about political interest and judgment is a sign here and now of the future quietus of heaven. “Quietism” doesn’t mean a retreat from advocacy or passion. Citing Pascal, Griffiths lays out a version of political advocacy that renounces political calculations of a conventional sort. Pascal’s political quietism is theologically grounded: According to Pascal, Christians should “understand opposition to a proposal you favor as an opportunity to suffer anything at all in the service of establishing... Read more

Liberalism and the State

Last updated on: April 10, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Steve Pincus argues that 1688 marked the “first modern revolution. The Glorious Revolution couldn’t have taken the form it did without the “series of ideological debates that informed and transformed conceptions of state, religion, and society” in the middle of the century (8). From these debates emerged a vision for a transformed Britain, and elements of this vision were brought to reality in the aftermath of 1688: “The creation of the Bank of England, war against France, and religious toleration were all... Read more

Gender Arianism again

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

My little post on Gender Arianism created some buzz. Some of the responses missed my argument. But that was partly my fault for making the argument so briefly and (perhaps) opaquely. Here’s what I hope is a somewhat clearer statement of the argument. In Deep Comedy, I argued that there was a deep link between ancient conceptions of time as cyclical or declining and metaphysical commitments about (to use Derrida’s pregnant terminology) supplementarity. In metaphysics, ancient philosophies assumed that anything derived was... Read more

Post-Nominalist Theology

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

John Milbank is no nominalist, yet in Beyond Secular Order he insists that the nominalists raised questions that could not simply be answered by a return to Thomas. He points to four questions: Do creatures stand “outside” God in any sense? Does analogy violate the law of non-contradiction (2 things are simultaneously same and different)? Can God communicate creative causality to creatures? What role does language, which is a human construct, play in understanding? (103-4). Nominalists had their own answer: Finish being... Read more

Sacramentum et Imperator

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

In a 2005 article, Daniel Van Slyke explores the use of sacramentum in non-Christian writers from the ancient world. He reiterates the common observation that the term is most often used in military contexts to describe the engagement of soldiers to military service. Livy, for instance, writes that during a military crisis of the fourth century BC, “The dictator, after he had proclaimed a cessation of public business because of the Gallic disturbance, bound all those of military age by... Read more