Rational war

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:03 am By Peter Leithart

In his 2003 Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, 3rd Edition (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society, Vol. 13) , Mark Juergensmeyer distinguishes between religious violence with its “symbolic targets” and “performative violence” from political violence with its strategic targets and rational aims. One of the “more rational” causes of war is conflict over land. The mind boggles: It’s as if the “motherland” and its borders were not regarded as “sacred” even by virtually... Read more

Poetic word, poetic world

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:04 am By Peter Leithart

Yahweh says “light,” and as soon as the word sounds light appears. God says, “waters divide,” and they are divided. And so on and on throughout the creation week. This is the form of Yahweh’s creating activity: Whatever the word means, that’s what the world becomes. Word made world. Everyone who confesses creation confesses so much. But what about the form of Yahweh’s words? Over the course of the creation week, Yahweh repeats Himself repeatedly: let there be, let there... Read more

Rule of Law

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:02 am By Peter Leithart

Haugen notes several times in his book that “the vast majority of victims of injustice in the developing world are not victimized by complicated, knotted violations of human rights, but rather by simple, brutal acts of violence that are already against the law in their own countries. Millions of victims of slavery and trafficking suffer in nations with robust antislavery and antitrafficking regulations. Millions of victims of rape, of illegal land seizure, of police brutality endure violence that explicitly violates... Read more

Things Unseen

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:51 pm By Peter Leithart

In his stirring, challenging Good News About Injustice, Updated 10th Anniversary Edition: A Witness of Courage in a Hurting World , Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission gives a fresh spin to living by faith instead of sight: “Christians . . . are meant to be particularly gifted in sustaining a commitment to what is true and important though unseen. The very essence of faith, we are told, is ‘the conviction of things unseen’ . . . Therefore, we who... Read more

Go to the Ant

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:42 pm By Peter Leithart

Gregory of Nyssa illustrates the incomprehensibility of creation by taking a page from Solomon: “Let, then, the man who boasts that he has attained the knowledge of real existence, interpret to us the real nature of the most trivial object that is before our eyes, that by what is knowable he may warrant our belief touching what is secret: let him explain by reason what is the nature of the ant, whether its life is held together by breath and respiration, whether it is regulated by vital... Read more

Classification

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:49 pm By Peter Leithart

Jorge Luis Borges cited the classification of animals from a fictional Chinese dictionary, and Foucault used that list to demonstrate the relativity of classification systems. Augustine beat them both to it. Faustus wants to distinguish neatly between sects and schisms, and concludes that there are only two sects, the Manichean and the children of darkness. Manicheans do not, as catholics claim, resemble pagans in the least. Catholics are the ones who resemble pagans. Well, Augustine says, it all depends on... Read more

God and Eros, again

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:42 pm By Peter Leithart

Jim Rogers of Texas A&M writes in response to my post about God and Eros (the rest of this post is from Jim): Re: your question, “What assumptions about sex are behind the common opinion that the Song is only an erotic poem, only a celebration of human sexuality and marriage, full stop?” I think a part of the answer is this: Commentators (and many Christians more generally) come to the other parts of Scripture dealing with sex with materialist/anthrocentric... Read more

Infant Baptism and Church History

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:44 pm By Peter Leithart

Church history provides a compelling argument in favor of infant baptism, but not in the usual way. The argument is not that there is evidence of the practice of infant baptism throughout church history (though there is). The argument is rather that the shape of church history is more compatible with paedobaptist than with credobaptist beliefs. That is: The church did not appear in history in fully mature form; it is still far from fully mature. Were the infant churches... Read more

God and Eros

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:42 pm By Peter Leithart

The erotic intensity of the Song is, these days, an argument against allegorizing. Walsh rightly argues the opposite: “Desire for an absent lover pulsates throughout eight chapters in a heady mixture of glee, frustration, exhaustion, and surrender. Experientially, readers would be able to relate to these descriptions with the desires they themselves harbor for love, harvests, or the most absent object of all, God. In this biblical thirst for otherness, the supernatural other cannot help but be recalled, if only... Read more

Desire and text

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:53 pm By Peter Leithart

What Carey Walsh calls the “jumpiness” of the Song ( Exquisite Desire ) has sometimes been taken as evidence of multiple authorship or sloppy editing. Walsh claims it is deliberate, a literary depiction of the desire that is the content of the Song. It is, as Walsh says, impossible to keep up with the lovers: “They are at home, out in the street, alone, together, in a pasture, atop a mountain, talking with others, in Jerusalem, near En-Gedi, talking to... Read more