Special Offers

Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Creative Destruction

Last updated on: August 9, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Hezekiah “completes” a Passover (2 Chronicles 31:1a), then starts breaking things. He continues until the destruction is also “complete” (2 Chronicles 31:1b; Heb. kalah). He breaks pillars, cuts down Asherim, and pulls down high places and altars. Hezekiah’s purge is described in a single complex verse, 2 Chronicles 31:1: A. After they completed all this [Passover celebration] B. all Israel went out C. to the cities of Judah D. and shattered pillars, cut Asherim, pulled down high places and altars C’.... Read more

Reformation Disenchantment?

Last updated on: August 8, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Since at least Max Weber, historians and sociologists have assumed that the Reformation contributed to what Weber called the “disenchantment” of the world. The thesis has inspired rich historical, sociological, and philosophical studies, from Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. As Alexandra Walsham puts it, the notion that “the religious revolution launched by Luther, Calvin, and other reformers played a critical role in eliminating assumptions about the intervention of magical and supernatural forces... Read more

Kantian Emotions

Last updated on: August 8, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

A “Kantian chapter on emotion and responsibility,” write John Sabini and Maury Silver (Emotion, Character, and Responsibility), …is easy to write and quick to read: the domain of the moral is the domain of the will expressed in action; it is the domain of that for which we are responsible. Emotions are beyond the will, and for this reason have no intrinsic moral value. We know nothing of moral significance about a person if we know that person’s emotions. People... Read more

Liturgical Repentance

Last updated on: August 7, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The Chronicler’s account of Hezekiah’s Passover (2 Chronicles 30:1–12) is arranged in a neat chiasm: A. Hezekiah sent letters of invitation to Israel to join in Passover, vv. 1–4 B. Couriers take decree throughout the land, vv. 5–6a C. Content of the invitation/decree, vv. 6b–9 B’. Couriers pass through cities of Ephraim and Manasseh, v. 10a A’. Mixed response to invitation, vv. 10b–12 A and A’ both indicate that the invitation comes from “the king and the princes” (vv. 2, 12).... Read more

From Gratitude to Entitlement

Last updated on: August 4, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Anthony Kronman begins his monumental Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan with several chapters on gratitude and its shifting fortunes in Western culture. He describes the shift from a gratitude-based organization of social life to a rights-based society. Gratitude assumes that social goods come by gift, on which we have no claim; entitlements are not gifts, and we can demand our rights. He writes, As more and more of the support one needs to live, in ordinary times and hard ones,... Read more

Creation and the Verba of Scripture

Last updated on: August 4, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The late John Webster offers this statement about the relationship between Scripture and “dogmatic reasoning” about creation (Christian Dogmatics, 134–5): Dogmatic reasoning is a further act of following in which, directed by the prophetic testimony and with the aid of the Spirit’s sanctifying grace, theological reason endeavors to build a conceptual account of the matter that the scriptural words present, to elaborate or enlarge on the scriptural res. Because it attempts to reconceive what it hears in Holy Scripture, dogmatics does... Read more

Blessed Bankruptcy

Last updated on: August 4, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Boyd Hilton writes (in Age of Atonement) about Evangelical “aetiology of business immorality” that emerges from 19th-century sermons, novels, and pamphlets: Once “fallen,” commercial man becomes a prey to materialism. His business absorbs too much of his life, and colours all his thoughts and actions, leaving no time for “legitimate” and “enlightened moral” amusement. “Hence these jaundiced, dyspeptic, jaded, emaciated, rheumatic, neuralgic, paralytic pill-boxes and boluses, ruins of men, who crowd the streets of mercantile and manufacturing cities, occupy counting-houses,... Read more

Calvin, Liturgy, Art

Last updated on: August 4, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

John Calvin isn’t the first theologian who comes to mind when thinking about either liturgy or art, much less the combination of the two. W. David O. Taylor thinks that’s unfortunate, and his recent Theater of God’s Glory is an effort to rehabilitate Calvin as a resource for liturgical theology. By attending to Calvin’s Trinitarian theology of material creation, Taylor hopes to show that Calvin has something to contribute to contemporary discussions. At points, Taylor knows that he has to pit... Read more

Worship Wars

Last updated on: August 4, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Ritualism was a major issue in mid-nineteenth-century Anglicanism. Though inspired by the Tractarians, the ritualists went much further in elaborating the Anglican liturgy. As Peter Marsh puts it (Victorian Church in Decline), “For over thirty years the High Church clergy, however moderate, had been raising the standards of worship in their churches by adopting the simplest ritualistic innovations, wearing a surplice while they were preaching for example, and they had often disturbed local custom and provoked Protestant feeling in doing so” (119).... Read more

Reformed Landscape

Last updated on: August 4, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Few studies of the Reformation, writes Alexandra Walsham (The Reformation of the Landscape), “have considered how it affected attitudes and practices associated with the world of trees, woods, springs, rocky outcrops, caves, mountain peaks, and other striking topographical features” of Britain. Studies of early modern England “have tended to treat the landscape as an inert and passive backdrop to the momentous events that accompanied the advent of Protestantism and the energetic attempts of the Roman Catholic faith to resist annihilation”... Read more

62
63
64
65
66

Browse Our Archives

TRENDING AT PATHEOS Evangelical

view all Evangelical blogs