Desiring order

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

In his early treatise de musica , Augustine arranges everything into a hierarchy: God and other immutable objects above; human souls between; bodies and other carnal things below. It’s a Neoplatonic and hardly Christian notion. But embedded within that Augustine gets at something more sound. “Delight or enjoyment sets the soul in her ordered place,” he says, citing Matthew 6:11. That step allows two other interesting ones: The reason why (inordinate?) delight in lower things cannot be beautiful is that... Read more

Boston Public Park

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:48 pm By Peter Leithart

Washington, Augustus on a prancing horse, sword pointing toward sunset. Over the pond, fringed with ice, droop the weeping willows. And what I miss most in the pine-blanketed West: leafless trees in cold sunshine. Read more

The Real is the Relational

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:56 pm By Peter Leithart

In expounding on the coherence of Trinitarian theology with contemporary physics, Polkinghorne notes htat “it is striking that so methodologically reductionist a subject as physics has pointed us in this relational and holistic direction. This tendency is surely reinforced by chaos theory’s discovery that at the macroscopic level of physical process there are many systems that are of such exquisite sensitivity to the details of their circumstance that they cannot be properly isolated from the effects of their environment. The... Read more

Rational universe

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

Polkinghorne is better when he points to the import of the remarkable fact that we can understand the inner structure of the universe: “our human ability to understand the universe far exceeds anything that could reasonably be considered as simply an evolutionary necessity, or as a happy spin-off from that necessity. The universe has proved to be astonishingly rationally transparent, and the human mind remarkable apt to the comprehension of its structure. We can penetrate the secrets of the subatomic... Read more

Accommodation

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

John Polkinghorne writes that the “human writings [of Scripture] bear witness to timeless truths, but they do so in the thought forms and from the cultural milieu of their writers.” As a result, “we find attitudes expressed in the Bible that today we neither an nor should agree with.” This description of accommodation is unusually helpful, because it displays the gnostic assumption behind the whole idea of accommodation. That is, accommodation assumes that the writers of Scripture intend to communicate... Read more

Flesh into Spirit

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:41 pm By Peter Leithart

The Word became flesh. He assumed everything that flesh is heir to – all our weakness, all our sorrow, all our sickness and shatteredness, all our godforsakenness, He took to Himself. But not merely to identify or sympathize. He took it to Himself to overcome it. He goes to the cross as flesh, and rises Spirit. He assumed flesh in order to fill it with the power of the Spirit. But – what is absolutely crucial – we still live... Read more

What’s Wrong With Apologetics

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:48 pm By Peter Leithart

Balthasar again: “For fundamental theology, the heart of the matter should be the question: ‘How does God’s revelation confront man in history? How is it perceived?’ But under the influence of a modern rationalistic concept of science, the question shifted ever more from its proper center to the margin, to be re-stated in this manner: ‘Here we encounter a man who claims to be God, and who, on the basis of this claim, demands that we should believe many truths... Read more

Fideism and Rationalism

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:41 pm By Peter Leithart

Balthasar resolves the dilemma between rationalistic and fideistic approaches to faith and reason by identifying a common flaw in them, and by proposing an aesthetic solution. The common flaw, he thinks, is that both rationalists and fideists “are wont to call the historical facts of revelation ‘signs,’ and to think of them as ‘pointes’ (quite capable ones, to be sure) to something mysterious which lies behind them and which must be believed.” Thus, there is “a parallelism of ostensive sign... Read more

Seeing spirit

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

Von Balthasar summarizes Roman Guardini’s insistence that “form is not only corporeal” by saying “The eye sees the life of plants in their kind of coloration, in the manner of their movements as brought about by air and contact. The eye sees the vitality of the animal. In man, it sees (and does not ‘infer’) the soul in its gestures, expressions and actions; indeed, it sees the soul even before the body, and the body only in the soul.” Read more

Accommodation

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

As Markus Barth saw it, Bultmann was Protestant accommodation gone to seed: “Bultmann’s conception rests on the thesis that visible miracles (signs) are only a concession to man’s weakness, and that the appearances of the risen Christ are, likewise, a concession to the weakness of the Apostles. But . . . even in the Old Testament the visible appearance of God [is] not something temporary – a means to an end or a mere concession – but rather . .... Read more