Ravished and Reformed

Last updated on: August 18, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Belden Lane knows that his thesis is surprising. In fact, the word “surprising” appears in the subtitle of his 2011 Ravished by Beauty, a study of Reformed spirituality’s “surprising legacy.” Neither ravishment nor beauty fits the stereotype of Reformed Christianity. But Lane says that both are central to Reformed spirituality from Calvin to Edwards. The beauty that ravishes is ultimately the beauty of God, and Reformed theology has developed “an extraordinarily passionate, personal, and at times highly erotic longing for God... Read more

Ravished and Reformed

Last updated on: August 18, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Relational Soul

Last updated on: August 18, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Richard Plass and James Cofield base their book, The Relational Soul, with the claim that “a deep participation in the life of another is the lifeblood of the soul” (15). Relationships are not epiphenomenal or added extras. They form the core of the soul. Plass and Cofield cite recent studies of the formation of the brain to suggest that the way we relate to our original others (parents especially) hardwires us in unique ways. We are relational souls because we are... Read more

Relational Soul

Last updated on: August 18, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Patterning the 144,000

Last updated on: August 18, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

When Israel camps around the tabernacle at Sinai, Yahweh lays out a map for the tribes, the Levites and priests forming the inner cordon around the tent and the tribes arranged more distantly with groups of three at each point of the compass (Numbers 2). Each group has a lead tribe, and the whole arrangement looks like this: East: Judah, with Issachar and Zebulun South: Reuben, with Simeon and Gad West: Ephraim, with Manasseh and Benjamin North: Dan, with Asher... Read more

Poet of the Trinity

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

Book 6 of Bonaventure’s The Soul’s Journey into God, is about the Trinity. The premise is that good is essentially “self-diffusive,” and thus the highest good must be “most self-diffusive.” This highest self-diffusion is not possible unless it is “actual and intrinsic, substantial and hypostatic, natural and voluntary, free and necessary, lacking nothing and perfect.” Perfect goodness requires that the good produce “what is actual and substantial, and a hypostasis as noble as the producer, as in the case in a... Read more

Not Images

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

Jenson admits in an essay on atonement in Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics that no single theory of atonement has won consensus. Some, he writes, “make a virtue of this proliferation of proposals and the absence of form or informal consensus around any one of them; others see in it a historical failure and a challenge to do better. I am among the latter, which may be unwise, but there I am” (128). One popular option for dealing with the variety of... Read more

Not Images

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

Let’s Get Happy

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

Michael Solana thinks science fiction is doing us a disservice. Nighmarish predictions of the future aren’t new, but Solana thinks that they’ve become pervasive. A sub-sub-genre has taken over the field, and occupied our imagination. Solana writes, “dystopia has appeared in science fiction from the genre’s inception, but the past decade has observed an unprecedented rise in its authorship. Once a literary niche within a niche, mankind is now destroyed with clockwork regularity by nuclear weapons, computers gone rogue, nanotechnology, and man-made... Read more

Exodus to Numbers

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

When the Lamb opens the sixth seal, the earth and sky collapse (Revelation 6:12-17). The earth shakes, the sky grows dark, the world begins to fall apart. Like Egypt in the time of Moses, the Lamb strikes the earth with plagues and, like the Egyptians, the people of the land run for cover. What should come next? If we’re following the Pentateuch, we’re not surprised to see a census-taking scene in chapter 7. Someone counts off the tribal numbers for... Read more