Puritanism

Last updated on: September 7, 2011 at 2:06 pm By Peter Leithart

A TLS essay review on recent books on Puritanism offers some helpful insights into that term and the movement it names. Recent work has so qualified and remolded “Puritan” that the term has been deemed all but useless, but the reviewed books indicate that a rehabilitation of the term (if not the Puritans themselves) is underway. It’s all a matter of identifying the central concerns of those called “Puritans.” The author locates the differences between Puritan and non-Puritan Anglican, at... Read more

Not a Patch-up

Last updated on: September 6, 2011 at 10:53 am By Peter Leithart

Mark McIntosh, as he often does, puts the well-known very well ( Mysteries of Faith (New Church’s Teaching Series) ): For early Christians “the Trinity was not a divine game of peek-a-boo in which a playful deity peeps out at them from behind different masks (now the ancient fellow with the beard, now the infant, now the bird, and so on) until God tires of the whole charade. No, when these Christians met God they were swept up into God’s... Read more

Copulative knowledge

Last updated on: September 5, 2011 at 3:53 pm By Peter Leithart

Luigi Gioia ( The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s De Trinitate ) explains the inseparability of intellect and will in Augustine’s epistemology: “something is recorded by our sensorial activity; this sensation awakens in us a desire to know its cause and to appreciate its value; this desire drives us to turn the sight of our mind to the reasons and standards so that they might enable us to define and evaluate the object known; at this point, if the definition of... Read more

Psychological Analogies

Last updated on: September 5, 2011 at 6:38 am By Peter Leithart

Anatolios again: He argues that Augustine’s psychological analogies for the Trinity (memory, intellect, will in one mind, eg) do not represent a retreat from an inter-personal model of the Trinity. He acknowledges that the love of lovers gives a “sight” of the life of the Trinity. He simply thinks it gives an inadequate sight, since human lovers are not consubstantial in the way the Triune Persons are. It gives inadequate sight too because Scripture itself teaches that the individual human... Read more

Analogy of Love

Last updated on: September 5, 2011 at 6:27 am By Peter Leithart

Anatolios again, on Augustine’s “analogy of love” from Book 8 of de Trinitate . Contrary to some interpreters, “this trinity of love is not simply a self-standing structure that ‘pictures’ the divine Trinity.” Anatolios insists instead that “it manifests the mind’s radical relatedness to God, since the love by which we love anything genuinely, according to Augustine, is God himself . . . . In loving another human being, we are first of all loving to love, and the love... Read more

Rahner’s Rule

Last updated on: September 5, 2011 at 6:21 am By Peter Leithart

Anything by Khaled Anatolios is an event, worthy of deep and careful reading. From my initial perusal, his recent Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine is no exception; on the contrary, it has the feel of a masterpiece. Nobody knows Athanasius as Anatolios does, and here he also provides lengthy studies of Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine. Few Trinitarian theologians, whether historically or systematically oriented, are as attuned to the Scriptural foundations of Trinitarian theology as he... Read more

Rahner’s Rule

Last updated on: September 5, 2011 at 6:21 am By Peter Leithart

Sermon notes

Last updated on: September 5, 2011 at 4:49 am By Peter Leithart

INTRODUCTION Isaiah’s oracle concerning the “valley of vision” focuses on Jerusalem (vv. 9-10) and specifically on the house of David (vv. 15-25). Though the city is full of confidence, Isaiah sees disaster looming. Like Babylon in the previous oracle, Jerusalem is unprepared to go through the valley of the shadow of death. THE TEXT “The burden against the Valley of Vision. What ails you now, that you have all gone up to the housetops, you who are full of noise,... Read more

Receptive God

Last updated on: September 5, 2011 at 4:11 am By Peter Leithart

“Worthy are You, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power,” sing the twenty-four elders and four living creatures in the heavenly throne room (Revelation 4:11). The reason the Lord is worthy of glory, honor, and power is that He created all things (a chiastic clause: create / all things / Your will / they are / were created). Worthy to receive ? Doesn’t God always already possess glory, honor, and power? Isn’t that what being... Read more

Eucharistic meditation

Last updated on: September 4, 2011 at 5:53 am By Peter Leithart

Isaiah 21:14: Bring water for the thirsty, O inhabitants of the land of Tema, meet the fugitive with bread. The final oracle in Isaiah 21 concerns Arabia. An unnamed enemy has attacked, and Arabs are in flight, chased by swords, drawn swords, bent bows, weighed down with the weight of battle. Glory-seeking warriors pour into Arabia, and within a year, Isaiah says, the glory of Kedar will come to an end. Isaiah exhorts the Arabs of the city of Tema... Read more

Which Christian hymn is often called the most popular in history and was written by John Newton?