Again in Church Dogmatics The Doctrine of the Word of God, Volume 1, Part 2: The Revelation of God; Holy Scripture: The Proclamation of the Church , Barth teases out the “negative” consequences of the confession that God has revealed himself in Jesus. If, Barth argues, Jesus tells us that “God is free for us here,” in the incarnate Son, then it also means that “He is not free for us elsewhere. It limits the freedom of God for us... Read more
At the beginning of Church Dogmatics The Doctrine of the Word of God, Volume 1, Part 2: The Revelation of God; Holy Scripture: The Proclamation of the Church , Barth insists that the actuality of Jesus is prior to the question of the possibility of incarnation. One cannot move from a general theology or anthropology to sketch the parameters of God’s possible entry into human flesh; that would put parameters around Jesus Himself. One must instead begin with Jesus, and... Read more
Glaeser ( Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier , 9) observes that city officials often attempt to renew a city with a “massive construction project – a new stadium or light rail system, a convention center, or a housing project.” If you build it, the city will come. Glaeser disagrees: “Shiny new real estate may dress up a declining city, but it doesn’t solve its underlying problems. The hallmark of... Read more
The auto industry was the secret to Detroit’s success. Its “Fordist” model of industrialization was also the cause of Detroit’s decline, according to Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (8-9): “Cities thrive when they have many small firms and skilled citizens. Detroit was once a buzzing beehive of small-scale interconnected inventors – Henry Ford was just one among many gift entrepreneurs. But the extravagant success of Ford’s big... Read more
Mediation does not stand in opposition to immediacy, argues Jean-Luc Marion in an essay on Pseudo-Dionysius. Rather, in the mode of gift, “mediation neither troubles nor retards immediacy but rather completes it” and indeed ” only mediation produces immediacy” ( The Idol and Distance: Five Studies (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy) , 169-70 ). The key to understanding this is to fit together Dionysian themes: hierarchy and gift, both understood Christologically. A gift is properly received, Marion argues, only if it... Read more
Postmodern thinkers like Zygmunt Bauman have pointed to the “liquidity” of contemporary life, its shape-shifting instability. We have nothing on Bonaventure and other medieval doctors, for whom creation was a river flowing from a Triune source. Zachary Hayes ( The Gift of Being: A Theology of Creation (New Theology Studies) , 65-6) explains that the image was drawn from meditation on the circular river of Ecclesiastes 1:7: According to the medieval reading, the text “envisions the river flowing from the... Read more
Over at The Guardian , Andrew Brown reports on the surprising strength of Calvinism in China. He cites Dr. May Tan of Singapore who predicts that Calvinism is becoming “an elite religion in China.” The reason, Tan says, is that Calvinism has a theology of resistance. Brown writes, “The great national myths of Calvinist cultures are all of wars against imperialist oppressors: the Dutch against the Spanish, the Scots against the English; the Americans against the British. So when the... Read more
Peter Leithart is one of those exceptional teachers who instills not merely his knowledge in his students, but a bit of himself as well—his patient character, his charitable and jovial spirit, his boundless curiosity—so that they are never quite the same. He always acts as both a pastor and a teacher at the same time, concerned for both the intellectual and spiritual growth of his students, as ready to listen to their own struggles and concerns and gnawing questions as... Read more
In his Philosophy and Its Others (Suny Series in Systematic Philosophy) , William Desmond commends on the self-definition of clothing: “Clothes are not simply artificial protection against the unruly elements to compensate for bald bodies. They may define a kind of self, may communicate the color of a personal presence. They testify to a self in dialectical mediation with the other who, in fact, the dressed self has imaginatively interiorized. They may even create a kind of self. If one... Read more
In his essay “Violence and Metaphysics” in Writing and Difference , Derrida summarizes Levinas’s claim that metaphysics is a pursuit of totality, of totalizing explanations, that invariably involves conceptual and real violence. Being is not so because it “commands nothing or no one.” He elaborates: “As Being is not the lord of the existent, its priority (ontic metaphor) is not an archia . The best liberation from violence is a certain putting into question, which makes the search for an... Read more
Leithart
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