Zwinglian Symbolism

Last updated on: November 7, 2017 at 5:46 pm By Peter Leithart

Nathan Mitchell (writing in the Oxford History of Christian Worship, 324) denies that Zwingli taught a “mere symbolist” according to which the Supper “simply served to remind believers of the great benefits bestowed on them through Christ’s passion and death.” Zwingli wasn’t a symbolist “in any modern sense.” Mitchell notes that Zwingli “affirmed, in language reminiscent of Calvin and Luther, that ‘the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ to those who partake of them in faith.’... Read more

Saved Tongues

Last updated on: November 9, 2017 at 10:10 pm By Peter Leithart

Beverly Gaventa (The Child in the Bible) points to the role of speech in Romans. Perverse speech is one of the key symptoms of the world of sin; by the cross and resurrection, Jesus has redeemed speech. She points to the inclusio around chapters 1-3: “the indictment itself actually begins with human repression of the truth (1:18), with the refusal to give thanks to God (1:21), and with exchanging truth about God for a lie (1:25). In Paul’s analysis, at... Read more

Uncle Sam Wants You

Last updated on: November 9, 2017 at 5:07 pm By Peter Leithart

How did the American federal government expand its power and reach? World War I is often cited as a turning point, but Christopher Capozzola’s Uncle Sam Wants You shows that this expansion wasn’t just a federal project. New forms of political obligations were enforced by local, unofficial forms of force and by increasingly “mystical” attachment to the nation and State. Capozzola writes that “Although the experience of war led to new political obligations and repressive state structures, the federal government did... Read more

Who’s Your Pop Culture?

Last updated on: November 10, 2017 at 8:38 pm By Peter Leithart

Some years ago, I gave a quiz to college-bound high school students. Take it yourself: Finish the following sentences or phrases: With great power . . . . Hasta la vista . . . . Do the . . . (Dew) Shaken, not . . . . Space, the final . . . . Think outside the . . . I’d walk a mile for . . . . May the force . . . Life is like a box .... Read more

Children’s Bible

Last updated on: November 9, 2017 at 2:31 am By Peter Leithart

The Bible speaks of children from beginning to end, the history it tells is a history of children. To recite the story of children in Scripture would be to recite Scripture. In the beginning: *Adam was born of earth and divine breath, naked as a newborn. *The protoevangelium is a promise of “seed.” *Sin spreads as a murderous conflicts among sons, and as violent Nephilim are born to sons of God married to daughters of men. *God promises Abraham children... Read more

Medieval Modernity

Last updated on: November 7, 2017 at 7:51 pm By Peter Leithart

“Modern” is an invention of the Christian Middle Ages. According to Krishan Kumar (From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society), “Modernus, from modo (‘recently’, ‘just now’) was a late Latin coinage on the model of hodiernus (from hodie, ‘today’). It was first used, as an antonym to antiquus, in the late fifth century AD. Later such terms as modernitas (‘modern times’) and moderni (‘men of today’) also became common, especially after the tenth century” (91). The contrast of “ancient” and “modern” wasn’t... Read more

My Temple, My Bride

Last updated on: November 10, 2017 at 8:49 pm By Peter Leithart

The description of Solomon’s temple in 1 Kings 6 employs a number of anatomical terms. The temple is “humaniform.” Read more

The Linguistic Construction of Reality

Last updated on: November 6, 2017 at 6:04 pm By Peter Leithart

Craig Gay (The Way of the (Modern) World) lucidly traces a line of development from Descartes’ separation of the human subject from the world of objects, through the Cartesian and Newtonian effort to reduce science to mathematics, to the triumph of technical manipulation. At the end point, the object-world outside us exists only as raw materials for our projects, and is no longer seen as a world to be received with thanks, and loved as God’s world and God’s revelation.... Read more

Truth, Love, Lies: Much Ado About Nothing

Last updated on: November 6, 2017 at 5:35 pm By Peter Leithart

The following is an excerpt from my Brightest Heaven of Invention, published in the misty days of the mid-1990s. Claudio looks at Hero’s appearance, and concludes she is a maid, a virgin. Because of Don John’s deception, he believes that he has peeled away the deceptive outer layer, the layer of seeming, and now sees Hero for what she really is—a prostitute visited by a stranger on the night before her wedding. Hero seemed to be a maid, but as... Read more

Plausible Impossibility

Last updated on: November 3, 2017 at 10:08 pm By Peter Leithart

Kathryn Schulz observes that “One of the strangest things about the human mind is that it can reason about unreasonable things. It is possible, for example, to calculate the speed at which the sleigh would have to travel for Santa Claus to deliver all those gifts on Christmas Eve. It is possible to assess the ratio of a dragon’s wings to its body to determine if it could fly. And it is possible to decide that a yeti is more... Read more