Self-fulfillment

Last updated on: May 14, 2013 at 9:22 pm By Peter Leithart

In Love and Responsibility , John Paul II pointed to the impossible possibility of betrothed love. On the one hand, “no person can be transferred or ceded to another. In the natural order, it is oriented towards self-perfection, towards the attainment of an ever greater fullness of existence – which is, of course, always the existence of some concrete ‘I.’” On the other hand, love is inherently self-gift, and thus it involves “making one’s inalienable and non-transferable ‘I’ someone else’s... Read more

Adam at rest

Last updated on: May 14, 2013 at 2:35 pm By Peter Leithart

Gregory Beale notes in The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God that the verb used in Genesis 2:15 for “put” is not the expected sim , but the rather rarer yanach , which bears some relation to the verb nacham , which describes the rest which Noah brought to the world (Genesis 5:29). It’s a truism that Noah is a new Adam, but it also seems that Adam was the first Noah.... Read more

Obama’s war

Last updated on: May 12, 2013 at 6:34 pm By Peter Leithart

Mark Mazetti’s The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth explains that Obama’s expansion of drone war is linked with his opposition to black sites and Bushian enhanced interrogation. The TNR reviewer writes: “To John Rizzo, the carryover general counsel at the CIA, the new administration chose targeted killing because that was ‘all that was left’ once it eliminated the interrogation option. Mazzetti puts the point in political terms.... Read more

Hegel’s promise

Last updated on: May 12, 2013 at 6:22 pm By Peter Leithart

In a review of several recent works on Hegel, Robert Pippin suggests that “the greatest Hegelian promise is a way of understanding what have seemed intractable dualisms and antinomies in modern thought and in modern life, while still doing justice to the claims of both sides of the dualism: claims we find difficult to reject and impossible to reconcile. Much of Hegel’s idealism, and his emphasis on his ‘logic,’ could be summarized as the claim that we seem stuck with... Read more

Portraits of Marx

Last updated on: May 12, 2013 at 5:54 pm By Peter Leithart

In his TNR review of Jonathan Sperber’s widely reviewed Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life , Peter Gordon includes some illuminating contemporary portraits, and self-portraits, of Marx’s life and thought. After first reading Hegel, he wrote this ecstatic account to his father: “A curtain had fallen . . . . [I] ran like mad in the garden on the filthy water of the Spree . . . ran to Berlin and wanted to embrace every day laborer standing on street corners.”... Read more

Anti Anti-Supercessionism

Last updated on: May 12, 2013 at 5:30 pm By Peter Leithart

I offer a critique of anti-supercessionism at the Trinity House site. Read more

Witness to deliverance

Last updated on: May 10, 2013 at 4:04 am By Peter Leithart

The story of Paul’s encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus is recounted several times in Acts: First when the event happens (ch. 9), and then twice retold by Paul, once before Jews and once before Agrippa and Festus (chs. 22, 26). In the final retelling, Paul quotes Jesus’ words: “I have appeared to you, to appoint you a minister and a witness not only to the things which you have seen, but also to the things in which... Read more

The Trouble with “Family Values”

Last updated on: May 10, 2013 at 3:37 am By Peter Leithart

I argue that cultural conservatives can’t address the crisis in the family without being willing to pose uncomfortable questions about our economic, political, and technological way of life at firstthings.com this morning. Read more

The Seals are Christ

Last updated on: May 9, 2013 at 5:44 pm By Peter Leithart

Apringius ( Latin Commentaries on Revelation (Ancient Christian Texts) , 43) follows a common tradition in interpreting the scroll in Revelation 5 as the Old Testament, once sealed and concealed and now revealed by the Lamb. On this interpretation, the seals of the book represent moments in the life of Jesus: “The seven seals are these: First, incarnation; second, birth; third, passion; fourth, death; fifth, resurrection; sixth, glory; seventh, kingdom. These seals, therefore, are Christ.” As William Weinrich explains in... Read more

Alpha and Omega

Last updated on: May 9, 2013 at 5:37 pm By Peter Leithart

Apringius Latin Commentaries on Revelation (Ancient Christian Texts) , 25-6) offers a fascinating numerological interpretation of Jesus’ declaration that He is Alpha and Omega. The numerical value of Omega is 800, and so is the Greek word peristera , “dove.” Alpha adds a 1 to this, and thus Jesus’ self-description indicates “the deity of the Holy Spirit [dove] in the unity of the Trinity.” The shape of the Greek Omega and the Latin “o” also bear theological weight: “In Greek,... Read more