Special Offers

Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Law of Love

Last updated on: October 17, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

For Thomas, the Torah was not simply another secular constitution. It was divine law, aimed at establishing not merely order or even justice but at encouraging charity. Thomas was echoing Jesus in his stress on the weightier things of the law – justice, mercy, truth. As Matthew Levering (Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah and Temple, 115-6) notes, Thomas doesn’t leave this with generalities, but examines specific regulations of Torah: “The laws found in Deuteronomy and Leviticus regarding property and exchange .... Read more

Subtlety, Agility, Clarity

Last updated on: October 17, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Matthew Levering has a delightful summary of Thomas’s delightful description of the resurrection body as subtle, agile, and full of “clarity” (Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah and Temple, 133-4). Subtlety, Levering explains, is “the ability of the body to penetrate.” Bodies will remain bodies, but “the penetration of glorified bodies enables them to move together in harmony, without causing disturbance or friction, because bodies will be entirely subject to their souls as their form. There will be no crowding in the... Read more

Accustomed to God

Last updated on: October 17, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The incarnation without the cross and exaltation doesn’t accomplish salvation. But the incarnation ain’t nothing. As Adam Kotsko says in his treatment of Irenaeus (The Politics of Redemption, 78), “the Incarnation of Christ simply taken in itself brings God into a much more intimate relationship with humanity, accustoming humanity to God and . . . also God to humanity.” By the incarnation, we have become accustomed to a God who rages against our hypocrisy and self-importance; a God who has... Read more

Keeping Torah

Last updated on: October 16, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In response to a critique of Thomas Aquinas’s views on the law from Michael Wyschogrod, Matthew Levering argues (Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah and Temple) that “the Mosaic law . . . is still observed by Christians” (his emphasis). Exactly right. And it gets better when Levering elaborates, “Christ’s passion not only fulfills but also perfects and elevates the Mosaic Law: Christ fulfills and transforms the moral precepts through his most perfect (supernatural) love of God and, in God, of all... Read more

Triumphant Love

Last updated on: October 16, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In one of the many wonderful passages in his Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah and Temple, Matthew Levering points to the Abelardian dimensions of Thomas’s atonement theology: “for Aquinas, as for Abelard, the person who meditates upon Christ’s passion is able to ‘[know] thereby how much God loves him, and is thereby stirred to love Him in return, and herein lies the perfection of human salvation’ God’s movement of love toward us inspires, by the power of the Holy Spirit, a corresponding... Read more

Dark Age

Last updated on: October 16, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

When the fourth trumpet sounds, the sun, moon, and stars are plagued (Revelation 8:12). A third of the stars are darkened, and day and night ceases to “shine” for a third of the time (two four-hour periods of darkness). The fourth trumpet partially reverses the fourth day of creation, when sun, moon, and stars were set in the firmament. With the cancellation of the fourth day, the world slips back toward the dark, empty formlessness that existed before the first... Read more

Dark Age

Last updated on: October 16, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

When the fourth trumpet sounds, the sun, moon, and stars are plagued (Revelation 8:12). A third of the stars are darkened, and day and night ceases to “shine” for a third of the time (two four-hour periods of darkness). The fourth trumpet partially reverses the fourth day of creation, when sun, moon, and stars were set in the firmament. With the cancellation of the fourth day, the world slips back toward the dark, empty formlessness that existed before the first... Read more

The Bondwoman

Last updated on: October 16, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The crucial association in Paul’s reading of the Abraham story (Galatians 4) is the link between Hagar, Sinai, and slavery. It also seems to be the weakest link. Is it simply a geographic association? Could the association turn on a pun? Hagar is a “bondwoman,” paidiske in Greek (Galatians 4:22-23, 30-31). This is what Hagar is called in the LXX of Genesis 16 too. The paid– root points to her youth more than her social status; it could be translated... Read more

Thomas and the East

Last updated on: October 15, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Several times in his The Godly Image, Romanus Cessario observes how Greek patristic writers influence Thomas’s understanding of the satisfaction of Christ. Cessario traces a shift from Thomas’s early Anselmian juridicism to a more personalist understanding of the atonement in his mature work. The difference, he suggests, had to do with the influence of Thomas’s reading of Eastern theology in his composition of Contra errores Graecorum: “Byzantine thought and its characteristic emphasis on divinization and spiritual theology more than compensate for... Read more

Elements v. Spirit

Last updated on: October 15, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Martinus de Boer (Galatians, 372) notes that the verb “walk by the Spirit” in Galatians 5:25 isn’t the normal peritateo but stoicheo, which means “stand or move in a row or line” as in a military formation. De Boer notes that “there may be an allusion, whether intentional or subconscious, back to the stoicheia tou kosmou (‘elements of the world’), which the Galatians once venerated. . . . Whereas they once ‘followed’ the stoicheia, they are now to ‘follow’ (stoicheo)... Read more

289
290
291
292
293

Browse Our Archives

TRENDING AT PATHEOS Evangelical

view all Evangelical blogs