Liberal Heresy

Last updated on: December 15, 2017 at 8:18 pm By Peter Leithart

Post-liberal movements in Europe are often denounced as “fascist,” “racist,” or “far-right.” Timothy Less disputes this. Populist parties – “France’s National Front, the Alternative for Germany, the Danish People’s Party, Poland’s Law and Justice, Hungary’s Fidesz and the Austrian Freedom Party” – usually cut across existing left-right divides. He concedes that “they articulate the concerns of social conservatives, as UKIP does,” but observes that “in matters of economics, their agenda has far more to do with Jeremy Corbyn than Nigel... Read more

Advent Symmetries

Last updated on: December 21, 2017 at 6:43 pm By Peter Leithart

Why would God bring the Savior into the world through a female virgin? Read more

Dostoevsky’s “Socialism”

Last updated on: December 14, 2017 at 2:04 am By Peter Leithart

Following the death of his first wife, Dostoevsky reflected on immortality, a meditation that led him into political musings on “socialism,” religious and secular. His premise, exemplified in his own brutal treatment of his wife, is that Ego controls our lives. Christ’s commands lay out the path toward fulfillment, but we can’t keep those commandments. If there is no future life, we are condemned to be enslaved to Ego forever, and will never reach fulfillment. Dostoevsky cannot believe that human... Read more

Migration of the Mystical

Last updated on: December 14, 2017 at 3:08 am By Peter Leithart

One of the key threads of Pecknold’s story (in Christianity and Politics) is the “migration” of the Christian notion of the mystical body. Henri de Lubac first demonstrated that between patristic period and the high middle ages, the term had moved from the Eucharist to the church itself. Early Christians believed that through Christ’s gift of his Eucharistic corpus mysticum, the church was formed into the true body of Christ. After Berengar’s Eucharistic heresy, no one dared call the Eucharist... Read more

Limits of the Fathers

Last updated on: December 8, 2017 at 7:04 pm By Peter Leithart

At the beginning of Cur Deus Homo (p. 260), Anselm commends his work to Urban II. In the process, he both commends the Fathers of the church, and suggests that they did not answer every question. First, the commendation: “Many of our holy Fathers and teachers, following the Apostles, speak frequently and on a grand scale about the logical principles1 of our faith. Their aim in doing so is to confute unwisdom, to shatter the rigid resistance of unbelievers and to nourish... Read more

Russia’s Destiny

Last updated on: December 14, 2017 at 2:07 am By Peter Leithart

In an 1880 speech at the Pushkin Festival, Dostoevsky reflected on the destiny of Russia. The Westernizing reforms of Peter the Great didn’t just introduce Western Engineering and fashion into Russia. Peter set the universal mission of the Russian people: “For what is the reform of Peter the Great to us, not merely for the future, but in that which has been and has already been plainly manifested to us? What did that reform mean to us? Surely it was... Read more

Reaping and Sowing

Last updated on: December 14, 2017 at 3:04 am By Peter Leithart

In The Limits of Power, Andrew Bacevich (a West Point graduate) has argued that we cannot disconnect our foreign policy from our “domestic dysfunction.” Bacevich notes that US foreign policy is driven by a belief in “liberty,” but liberty defined as abundance, the freedom to indulge our lust for more and ever more. In its fight for liberty, Washington’s foreign policy establishment determines “that nothing interfere with the individual American’s pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness” – all defined as... Read more

Can Allah Create?

Last updated on: December 20, 2017 at 9:45 pm By Peter Leithart

Is it conceivable that a god like Allah could create the world? Does it make any sense to say that an absolutely sovereign but Unitarian god created the universe? Read more

Anselm and the Devil

Last updated on: December 18, 2017 at 7:50 am By Peter Leithart

Anselm is sometimes accused of deleting the devil from the story of atonement. His satisfaction theory is said to displace and replace the Christus Victor theology of the church fathers, and in so doing to replace and displace Jesus’ conquest of the devil from the center of the atonement. In fact, this isn’t the case. Anselm repeatedly refers to the devil’s role in derailing the human race, and the need for a human being to overcome the devil to bring... Read more

Must God Save Sinners?

Last updated on: December 12, 2017 at 1:50 am By Peter Leithart

Evangelicals commonly say things like, God would have been perfectly just if He had sent the whole of sinful humanity to hell. Anselm would beg to differ. God created “rational beings” so that “through rejoicing in him, it might be blessedly happy” (Cur Deus Homo, 315). Man was created for happiness. If man had not sinned, he would not have died, and so would have obtained happiness: “it is repugnant to the wisdom and justice of God that he should... Read more