All theology is about God. All theology is theology proper. For Christian theology, the only God who is is the God who created this world. All theology is theology of creation. There is no God but the God of history, who chose Israel. All theology is covenant theology. There is no God but the God who speaks, eternally and in time in human language. All theology is biblical theology. There is no God but the God and Father of the Son... Read more
Rummaging around John McGuckin’s magisterial, encyclopedic, and very big history of the first millennium of Christianity, The Path of Christianity, uncovers some delightfully unexpected treasures. In chapter 7, he examines the reasons for the focus on Greek and Latin Christianity, and laments that “the non-Greek and non-Latin Christianities of the ancient world . . . have their own stories: much of which has been overlaid and forgotten, and some of it entirely lost, to the universal church” (482). He spends the... Read more
Oliver O’Donovan takes note of the power of the church’s prophetic word. That’s sexy. It’s not so sexy to be reminded that “the church’s speech is also prayer, speech addressed to God, from whom it originated, from the whole body on behalf of each charism in it” (Desire of Nations, 188). This power is, or should be, continuous, as the “foundation for every other powerful speech which may be given from time to time” (189). So, prayer is the speech that... Read more
Solomon is a builder. The verb banah (build) is used 31 times in the Chronicler’s account of Solomon, mostly with reference to the construction of the temple. Chapter 8, though, uses the verb 8 times, mainly to refer to building projects other than the temple. After twenty years of building the temple and his palace (8:1), then Solomon gets busy building—cities, storage facilities, stables, a palace for Pharaoh’s daughter. One project arrests the eye: “Tadmor in the desert” (8:4). It’s... Read more
Near the beginning of Value in Capitalist Society, Paul Cobben is explaining Marx’s use of Hegelian themes and turns of argument when he summarizes Hegel’s notion of Perception, a level of knowing beyond “Sense Certainty.” Cobben writes: Perception does not assume to have immediate knowledge of objective reality. This knowledge is mediated through the perception of properties. The question is, however, whether this cognitive criterion is sufficient to have knowledge of the objective reality, a reality which is in it-self, which can... Read more
Justice does not, David Hume argued, arise from judges with a rigorous concern for equity. It arises, like other social goods, from the mysterious harmonization of self-interested actions: “as the self-love of one person is naturally contrary to that of another, these several interested passions are obliged to adjust themselves after such a manner as to concur in some system of conduct and behaviour. This system, therefore, comprehending the interest of each individual, is of course advantageous to the public; tho’... Read more
In a scathing essay Trump and his New Nationalist supporters, Daniel Krauthammer observes that Trump defines national “greatness” as “winning”: “That was what his whole campaign was based on. His language is never about political ideals; it is about defeating opponents, being better than the other guy—win, beat, kill, huge, rich, big league. His sense of national greatness seems largely transferred from his views of what makes a business or an individual (namely himself) great: wealth, power, status, deal-making. Greatness is achieved, most fundamentally, by... Read more
“We dismiss what philosophers take to be the fundamental exercise of justice,” writes Ambrose in his Christianized Ciceronian treatise de officiis (translation, From Irenaeus to Grotius, 84-5). According to Ambrose’s summary, philosophical justice takes as “the primary criterion . . . that we do no harm except in return for harm done,” a principle rejected by Jesus. The second philosophic principle is “to treat common or public property as public, private as private.” Ambrose considers this distinction unnatural: “Nature’s bounty... Read more
In the Divine Institutes, Lactantius takes on Plato’s endorsement of common property. He makes a grudging admission that it might be “supported so long as it appears to refer only to money.” After all, “everyone should be wise enough to despise money!” (translation from From Irenaeus to Grotius, 48). Even with money, “it is both impossible and unjust.” But Plato’s suggestion that marriages should be common sets Lactantius off: “Males may crowd together like dogs to the same female, and whoever... Read more
In The Watershed of Modern Politics, the last of a trilogy on the emergence of modern political thought from the Latin Middle Ages, Francis Oakley observes that “arguments based on secular political analogies, or arguments simply taking for granted something of a constitutional overlap between political and ecclesiastical modes of government, had served as a mainstay of ecclesiological discourse, whether high papalist or constitutionalist” for many centuries, and persisted well into the nineteenth century (209-10). Many historians acknowledge this “when it... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In