Tragedy of Judgment

Last updated on: February 26, 2018 at 7:33 pm By Peter Leithart

What is tragedy? Some might think that it’s an easy question to answer. Crack open the nearest copy of Aristotle’s Poetics, and there you have it. It’s not so easy. What Chaucer meant by tragedy is not what Aristotle met, and in the modern age Hegel proposed a different theory of tragedy with predictably Gnostic overtones. To make things complicated, A.C. Bradley’s classic study of Shakespearean tragedy reads Shakespeare Hegelianly. Let’s refine the question: What is a Shakespearean tragedy? To... Read more

Who Do You Say I Am? Part 1

Last updated on: February 25, 2018 at 3:29 pm By Peter Leithart

Jesus bursts onto the scene in Mark as a strong man, conquering enemy after enemy. After His baptism, the Spirit drives Him into the wilderness, where He overcomes the devil and survives wild beasts. He enters the synagogue at Capernaum to teach on a Sabbath, and is met by a “man with an unclean spirit.” Jesus rebukes the spirit and commands him to come out, and the spirit obeys. “What kind of authority is this?” everyone wonders: “He commands unclean... Read more

Mission of the Crucified

Last updated on: February 20, 2018 at 11:44 pm By Peter Leithart

The following excerpt is taken from the first volume of my Matthew commentary, recently published by Athanasius Press. Jesus summoned the Twelve to Him and gave them authority and power (Matthew 10). He sent them out to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He told them to proclaim the kingdom of heaven. He said that they would have power to heal, raise the dead, cast out demons, cleanse lepers. They didn’t even have to take any staff with... Read more

Science and Anti-Catholicism

Last updated on: February 22, 2018 at 5:27 pm By Peter Leithart

John Hedley Brooke (Science and Religion, 44-45) summarizes the argument of JW Draper’s 1875 History of the Conflict between Religion and Science: “The history of science, he wrote, is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side and the compression arising from traditional faith, and human interests, on the other. Draper was an English scientist who became the first president of the American Chemical Society. Living through the post-Darwinian... Read more

Sinsick

Last updated on: February 23, 2018 at 2:44 am By Peter Leithart

In an essay in Sin, Death, and the Devil, Stanley Hauerwas describes our “sinsick” condition, drawing from Thomas for help. Thomas links sin and sickness in a way that, Hauerwas says, strikes moderns as “bizarre”: “‘Sickness’ for us . . . is pointless. Being ‘sick’ is a condition that should not exist and thereby justifies unlimited interventions to eliminate what we regard as an arbitrary inconvenience” (15). Thomas thought the opposite. Sickness isn’t pointless “but rather an indication of the... Read more

Sevens Everywhere

Last updated on: February 22, 2018 at 6:06 pm By Peter Leithart

Everyone knows that Genesis 1 claims that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. William Brown (Seven Pillars of Creation) shows that the sevens are everywhere in the creation account: “The account of Genesis 1 is carefully structured around seven days within which eight acts of creation and ten commands are listed. The number seven is no random counting. God ‘saw’ and pronounced creation ‘good’ seven times; ‘earth’ or ‘land’ (same word in Hebrew) appears... Read more

Myths of Science

Last updated on: February 22, 2018 at 5:18 pm By Peter Leithart

Galileo Goes To Jail, a 2009 collection of essays edited by Ronald Numbers, examines 25 myths of science and religion. The essays aren’t defenses of religion by any means; they instead aim at complicating the received scientific triumphalism and set records straight. Maurice A. Finocchiaro tackles myth #8, that Galileo was imprisoned and tortured by the Inquisition. Finocchiaro admits that court documents make it appear that Galileo was jailed and perhaps tortured. Other evidence indicates that Galileo was treated far... Read more

The Sin of Tolerance

Last updated on: February 22, 2018 at 8:23 pm By Peter Leithart

The late Billy Graham from a 1959 issue of Christianity Today. 1959!! One of the pet words of this age is “tolerance.” It is a good word, but we have tried to stretch it over too great an area of life. We have applied it too often where it does not belong. The word “tolerant” means “liberal,” “broad-minded,” “willing to put up with beliefs opposed to one’s convictions,” and “the allowance of something not wholly approved.” Tolerance, in one sense,... Read more

Modernity as Aspiration

Last updated on: February 22, 2018 at 5:48 pm By Peter Leithart

“Modernity,” writes Jason A. Josephson-Storm, “is first and foremost the sign of a rupture . . . a device for positing significant historical breaks” (The Myth of Disenchantment, 7). By designating something as “modern,” we associate it with novelty, up-to-dateness, “the current.” But modernity is also a spatial reality: “to call a culture modern is to ally it with newness and to consign its opposite to colonization or the scrap heap of history.” Modernity “is as much a project as... Read more

Imago Dei

Last updated on: February 22, 2018 at 12:46 am By Peter Leithart

Frances Young (God’s Presence, 173-4) offers this summary of the post-Nicene consensus concerning the image of God in man: “Athanasius and the Cappadocians, those who fashioned the notion of theopoiesis/theosis and recognized that it implied Nicene orthodoxy, were those who had a sense of the interrelationship of differing aspects of God’s image as presented in different parts of scripture. This doctrinal ‘ecology,’ by which key components mutually sustain one another, was rooted in traditional Christian thinking as found in Irenaeus... Read more