Anti-skepticisms

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:46 pm By Peter Leithart

Milbank notes in Theology and Social Theory that there are two modern responses to skepticism. One is the Cartesian view that “thinks of the known object both as something ‘beneath’ the subject, and so as under the subject’s control, like the instruments of technology, and also ‘within’ the subject to the degree that it is fully known.” The Cartesian responses attempts to “conceal the abyss opened to view by the post-Renaissance discovery that language creates rather than reflects meaning. This... Read more

Local and Catholic

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:11 am By Peter Leithart

John Ratzinger offers this neat summary of the relation of local and universal church: “the Church is realized immediately and primarily in the individual local Churches which are not separate parts of a larger administrative organization but rather embody the totality of the reality which is ‘the Church.’ The local Churches are not administrative units of a large apparatus but living cells, each of which contains the whole living mystery of the one body of the Church: each one may... Read more

Anamnesis and Anticipation

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:46 pm By Peter Leithart

The Eucharist makes the church. How? This is not the whole of the answer, but: Through anamnesis and anticipation. Eucharist is a memorial of the death of Jesus; Eucharist is an anticipation of the marriage supper of the Lamb. The church is a people of shared time, of shared past and future, the people distended in the “already,” the present, between shared memory and anticipation. This is not a purely immanent account. Since that time is God’s time – God’s... Read more

Night Passions

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:09 am By Peter Leithart

The woman of the Song of Songs is too overwhelmed with passion and longing for her man that she gets up from bed and roams around looking for him, until she can “arrest” him and bring him back home (3:1-5). As Keel points out, her actions are not unlike the adulteress of Proverbs 7:11, who also wanders the streets in search of a lover. It’s not the first time that faithful love looks like unfaithful. Ruth sneaks up to the... Read more

A Cheer for Vatican I

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:45 pm By Peter Leithart

In a chapter on Yves Congar, Fergus Kerr (in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians ) says that the question of religious freedom had to be on the agenda for Vatican II because “it was a major issue inherited from the First Vatican Council. It was even the major issue: the point of Vatican I’s doctrine of papal supremacy was, in its own way, equivalent to the Oxford Movement’s resistance to erastianism in the Church of England, and to the Disruption of 1843... Read more

Eckhart, pantheist?

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:36 pm By Peter Leithart

No, says Milbank. But then he often sounds pantheistic, to his contemporaries as well as to us. How does Milbank defend him? Here’s what I think I’ve figured out: 1) God is transcendent, and this means (in Milbank’s Cusan theology) that He transcends oppositions; there is a “coincidence of opposites” in God. 2) Specifically, it means He transcends the opposition of difference/identity. If God were simply different from creatures, He would be another being on the same plane as other... Read more

Analogy of Being

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:46 pm By Peter Leithart

What should we say about the traditional notion of the analogy of being, rejected vigorously by the very different Reformed theologians, Karl Barth and Cornelius Van Til? Some initial thoughts follow: 1) The Bible gets along just fine without saying God is “Being itself.” So can we. On the other hand, the Bible never says “homoousion” either, and yet we confess that. “God is Being” is part of the Christian tradition, and so we need to grapple with it. The... Read more

Homosexual Monogamy?

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

An article in the January 28, 2010 issue of the New York Times cites a study that indicates that, contrary to the defenses offered for a change in law, gay marriage does not nudge homosexuals toward monogamy: “A study to be released next month is offering a rare glimpse inside gay relationships and reveals that monogamy is not a central feature for many. Some gay men and lesbians argue that, as a result, they have stronger, longer-lasting and more honest... Read more

Aquinas the Foundationalist?

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:46 pm By Peter Leithart

No, according to A.N. Williams, writing in New Blackfriars . Williams defines foundationalism not only in terms of the structural distinction between basic and inferred propositions, but in telic terms: “the purpose of the non-inferred or basic propositions is to impart to the structure as a whole a measure of certainty.” He also notes that this criterion often loosens “as one moves farther away from the classical roots of the idea in Aristotle and Descartes,” because “criteria for foundations are... Read more

Idiots interview

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

I got interviewed by some idiots here: http://idiots.dunedain.net/ That is not an insult. That’s what they call themselves. Read more