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Why the Torah

Last updated on: November 24, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a 2007 essay reprinted in his Pauline Perspectives, NT Wright gives this tight and quite wonderful summary of what Paul says about the cross in Romans 5-8. He is correct about Paul and largely correct in his criticisms of traditional atonement theologies. He observes that the opening section of Romans 8 “is perhaps the clearest statement of substitution, indeed penal substitution, in Paul: there is ‘no condemnation’ for those who are in Christ (8.1), because God has passed judicial sentence... Read more

Gift of Death

Last updated on: November 24, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

“Christian life is an impossible newness given as an unfitting gift,” writes John Barclay in his contribution to Apocalyptic Paul. Since it is a gift, the “new competence” of believers “is wholly dependent on the life of Christ, present within” (73-74). But it’s important to specify what that gift is. It is not “a new set of competencies added to their previous capacities, nor an enhancement of their previous selfs.” The gift is “rather a death, and the emergence from that... Read more

Exodus to Sabbath

Last updated on: November 21, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The oath of the strong angel in Revelation 10 knits together two passages. The angel’s oath stance – hand raised – alludes back to Ezekiel 20, where Yahweh reminds Israel of the day He chose them and lifted His hand (Heb. ‘esse’ yadi), making Himself known to them as Yahweh their God (v. 5). In raising His hand before Israel, He committed Himself to “bring them out of the land of Egypt into a land that I had selected for... Read more

No More Jew or Greek

Last updated on: November 21, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

“Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom,” says Paul. Most interpretations focus on the objects: Jews are defined by signs, Greeks by wisdom. Stanislas Breton (A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, 143-4) is more interested in the verbs: “We have here a simple typology, limited to an essential factor that seems to anticipate history itself by specifying less what is than what ‘had to be.’ The two Greek words (aitein and zetein) have, in the apostle’s intention, the value... Read more

Predestination, Imperatives, and the Meaning of Being

Last updated on: November 21, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Stanislas Breton (A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, 59) observes that for Paul “Time [is] the expression or explication . . . of the eternal.” He elaborates by linking predestination with the imperative of creation to sketch out a linguistic/constructivist ontology: “Word and seed correspond to each other . . . . as Meister Eckhart will remember when he writes, ‘The being [of things] is the verb by which God speaks all things in speaking to them.’ Or again . .... Read more

Being and Advent

Last updated on: November 21, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Stanislas Breton (A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, 56-7) observes that Plato dealt with mythology not be eliminating the gods but by taking their mythical histories as metaphor of the real, “by reading the elevating density of the intelligible in the heaviness of the sensible.” Platonic dualism thus coheres with Platonic allegory. Biblical allegory, by contrast, is temporal, and this too implies a dualism or duality, not between sensible and intelligible but between earlier and later. This hermeneutics too has... Read more

God the Monster

Last updated on: November 21, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Everybody loves Jesus. Gandhi loves Jesus. The Dali Lama loves Jesus. Everybody thinks Jesus just the best. Not exactly everyone, because some thugs hated Him enough to kill Him. But now we see their error, and everybody loves Jesus. But many of those who love Jesus don’t believe He rose from the dead, because resurrection from the dead is impossible. So the end of this lovable Jesus is a cross and a tomb. And then what must we say about the Father... Read more

Jews Hidden and Exposed

Last updated on: November 20, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his remarkable Acquittal by Resurrection, Markus Barth argues that the judgment by which God justifies “cannot be a paradox or a wanton and arbitrary decision.” Barth lays out three conditions that such a judgment must fulfill if it is to be considered righteous: It must have “a solid legal ground,” that is, it must be grounded in God’s own law and covenant; it must do something that has not been done, has not been possible, under the Old Covenant; and... Read more

What the Marriage Pledge Means

Last updated on: November 20, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Rational people, people of good will and good sense, will differ about the wisdom of the Marriage Pledge written by Ephraim Radner and Christopher Seitz and endorsed by Rusty Reno this week. They have already begun to differ. A defense of the Pledge would go something like this: Churches that hold to traditional marriage are eventually going to be forced into the position articulated in the Pledge anyway. If the state says “marriage” includes male-male and female-female unions (and who knows what... Read more

Unnatural Naturalism

Last updated on: November 20, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a NYRB review of an exhibition of Cubism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Julian Bell links the early cubist experiments of Georges Braque to the impressionism of Cezanna: “In his artistic researches, Cézanne had been intent to paw at the boundary between his personal visual sensations and the ‘Nature’ (or ‘the real world,’ as we might now say) that he could walk through and handle and inhabit.” Braque claims to go further: “I can go beyond that. I can take... Read more

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