“John Calvin was no monastic.” Matthew Myer Boulton states the obvious ( Life in God: John Calvin, Practical Formation, and the Future of Protestant Theology , 28). Calvin is a critic of the monasticism of his time, and even criticizes the withdrawal of monks in earlier, better times. What’s not so obvious is how much Calvin’s program is a transposition of the “paideutic tradition” of monasticism into a new key: “Calvin’s project of religious and civic reform in Geneva amounts... Read more
Matthew Myer Boulton argues that the reforms in worship inaugurated by Calvin were intended to establish a worship that “was in the first place a matter of verbal, catechetical, intellectual engagement with God’s word revealed in Scripture and expounded from the pulpit” ( Life in God: John Calvin, Practical Formation, and the Future of Protestant Theology , 33). He adds, importantly, that this was “corrective, not reductive,” and was part of “a broad, multidimensional program of Christian formation.” A key... Read more
In a review of Richard Sherlock’s Nature’s End: The Theological Meaning of the New Genetics (Religion and Contemporary Culture) in Touchstone , J. Daryl Charles responds to Sherlock’s claim that in both Thomas and Calvin “natural law in any of its forms is ultimately an inadequate moral guide.” The Calvinist reasons are that “our sinful nature is too corrupt for us to perceive in [nature] any teleology,” and that moral knowledge depends not only on knowledge of God as Creator... Read more
Why does Christianity seem so implausible to so many people in the modern world? In an interview by Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio concerning Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society , Brad Gregory suggests an answer. One of the reasons that early modern political thinkers and philosophers concluded that theology was a matter of private judgment was the inability of Christians to agree on some of the basic claims of their faith. There seemed... Read more
Peter Brown ( Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD , 504-5) summarizes the arguments of some posthumously published lectures of Michel Foucault on pastoral power: “It had deep roots in the ancient Near East and in Early Christian discourse. It was ‘absolutely specific and different from political power’ as it had usually been conceived in the Greco-Roman world. It was a power that was thought... Read more
Whether it’s what Americans wanted to vote for, what we actually collectively voted for was stasis. George Friedman says this at the Stratfor site this morning: “The national political dynamic has resulted in an extended immobilization of the government. With the House — a body where party discipline is the norm — under Republican control, passing legislation will be difficult and require compromise. Since the Senate is in Democratic hands, the probability of it overriding any unilateral administrative actions is... Read more
In the Guardian today, Linda Woodhead explores the dilemmas of religious liberty. On the one hand is the “libertarian” approach favored by Americans, under which religious freedom is limited only when “it violates civil law or harms others.” In Europe, the more common approach is “secularist,” a system where “individuals should be free to express their religion in the privacy of their homes, churches or temples – but not in public.” Some European intellectuals “would even restrict the use of... Read more
I regularly buttonhole students and pastors and colleagues, Ancient-Mariner-like, and try to impress upon them the importance of Peter Leithart’s work for our generation and context. He is an exemplary theologian, a consummate renaissance man who hearkens back to an ancient tradition of theology, before our fabricated disciplinary distinctions and academic enclaves. Peter is an interpreter of Scripture who is equally at home reading Jane Austen, a theologian whose orientation is rooted in prayer and worship. He is unapologetically Reformed... Read more
Richard Polt gives a lucid explanation of Heidegger’s tortured somewhat explanation of freedom ( Heidegger: An Introduction , 128): “Freedom is not just an ability to do whatever we want. More profoundly, freedom is our release into an open area where we can meet with other beings. A rock is not free, not because it is forced to do what it does not want, but because it is totally shut off from everything around it – and consequently cannot want... Read more
George Steiner ( Martin Heidegger , 155-6) approaches the essence of Heidegger: ” Sein ist Sein and the rejection of paraphrase or logical exposition have their exact precedent in the ontological finality of theology . . . they are the absolute equivalent to the Self-utterance and Self-definition of the Deity – I am that which I am – and to the refusal, as complete in Kant as it is in the Old Testament itself, to anatomize, to decompose analytically the... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In