Color of Law

Last updated on: June 22, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Richard Rothstein’s Color of Law demonstrates that “until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live” (vii). Segregation didn’t just happen. It’s the result of deliberate policy. The book is full of unsettling vignettes, like this: “in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area of East Palo Alto . . . sold his house to a black family. Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California... Read more

Sources of “Justification”

Last updated on: June 21, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In Paul’s letters, the verb “justify” (Gr. dikaioo) means “acquit, judge favorably,” with overtones of forgiveness and reconciliation. It has an invariably positive meaning. Paul didn’t learn to use “justify” that way from ancient or contemporary Greek. As James Prothro explains in a 2016 article, outside the Septuagint and the New Testament, the verb takes both impersonal and personal objects. In the first case, the verb means “to deem a thing or action dikaios,” and the latter would mean anything from... Read more

Jesus is King

Last updated on: June 20, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Joshua W. Jipp argues in Christ Is King that “kingship discourse” provides the “most helpful framework” (42) for understanding Paul’s teaching on law, salvation, and justice. Greco-Roman political discourse was full of kingship discourse. In this “ideology,” the king is the image of the divine king who comes as a benefactor, to rescue his people, to transform them by his own glory and virtue, and to bring them into a place of harmony of law (21). Paul drew on this discourse and grafted... Read more

Necrophilia

Last updated on: June 20, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

We live in a death-avoidant culture. We have moved the dying from the home to nursing home or hospital, out of the paths of everyday life, and we send the dead to the antiseptic environs of the funeral home. We can view an embalmed corpse without the noxious experience of decay, and the embalmed can look more alive than the living. As Candi Cann puts it in her Virtual Afterlives, “Dead bodies are no longer part of our lives unless... Read more

Solomon’s Creative Wisdom

Last updated on: June 19, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

When Queen Sheba visits Solomon, she sees things that take her breath away (2 Samuel 9:3–4), seven things, which roughly match the seven days of creation: 1. All she sees expresses the wisdom of Solomon, wisdom from God who made the world by His wisdom (Proverbs 8). 2. Sheba is impressed with the house Solomon built. We’re not told whether this is the house of Yahweh or Solomon’s own palace. If the former, it is an earthly form of the firmament-tent of... Read more

Is Calvin Among the Liberals?

Last updated on: June 16, 2017 at 6:00 am By Peter Leithart

Matthew Tuininga’s Calvin’s Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church aims to be more than an historical study of Calvin’s “two kingdoms” political theology. Tuininga wants to demonstrate that Calvin’s theology is a neglected resource for contemporary Christian political engagement. According to Calvin, Christ rules everything in order to transform all things into a future heavenly kingdom. In the present age, humanity is governed by two “sharply differentiated” orders or governments: the spiritual government of the Church, which... Read more

Gone Fishin’

Last updated on: May 29, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Taking a summer break. Back later in June. Read more

Postmodern Conservative

Last updated on: May 26, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In one of the many obituaries for Peter Augustine Lawler, Yuval Levin reviews Lawler’s case for “postmodern conservatism.” Lawler writes: “Conservatives can be (perhaps the only) genuinely postmodern thinkers. The reason we can see beyond the modern world is that its intention to transform human nature has failed. Its project of transforming the human person into the autonomous individual was and remains unrealistic; we can now see the limits of being an individual because we remain more than individuals. The... Read more

Perilous Partners

Last updated on: May 26, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Reflecting on President Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia, Ted Galen Carpenter (co-author of Perilous Partners) notes that “the Saudi regime abets extremism in multiple ways. Riyadh has funded schools (madrassa) in various Muslim countries for decades to promote the Wahhabi religious cult that has intimate ties with the royal family. Wahhabi clerics indoctrinate youth in a most virulent anti-Western perspective.” Saudi support of terror isn;’t theoretical: “Numerous analysts have noted that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9-11 were Saudi nationals, but that... Read more

Naming the Beasts

Last updated on: May 26, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Joseph Poon devotes a monograph, based on his PhD thesis, to identifying the land and sea beasts in Revelation 13. Poon makes creative use of the tripartite structures identified by Georges Dumezil to explain how the dragon, the sea beast, and the land beast form a triad. Dumezil identifies “three social-religious functions” in “four mythological traditions including the Indic, the Iranian, the Scandinavian and the Roman” (116). At the top of the hierarchy is the sovereign, representing “both the juridical and supernatural... Read more