God’s Advocates

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

God’s Advocates , Rupert Shortt’s 2005 collection of interviews with prominent Christian thinkers, is one of the best introductions to contemporary theology available. Premised on the claims that theology is recovering its nerve and that this recovery is especially noticeable in the UK and America, the book includes interviews with Rowan Williams, Alvin Plantinga, John Milbank, Jean-Luc Marion, Stanley Hauerwas, Miroslav Volf, and Oliver and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan and covers the range of topics you’d expect from those theologians and... Read more

Social determinism

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Christians typically object to deterministic social theories. Humans are not, we insist, slaves to birth, culture, nurture, social status, political affiliation. We are free. That may be the wrong answer. The right answer may be: Yes, outside of Christ, human beings are slaves to all those things and more. These are the “powers” and the “elementary principles” that hold people in bondage, the powers from which Jesus releases us by His cross and resurrection. Perhaps what we count as evidence... Read more

Barth

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:47 pm By Peter Leithart

Rowan Williams says in an interview with Rupert Shortt, “what caught me and still catches me about Barth is that sense of exuberant bloody-mindedness, enlarged upon at huge length, the gusto, the verve of the theology, with all its outrageous misunderstandings of other people and its wonderfully sanctified egotism.” Read more

Melville the Metaphysical

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:10 am By Peter Leithart

FO Matthiessen notes the influence of the metaphysical style “of being ‘totus in illo’” both in individual lines (blubber burning “smells like the left wing of the day of judgment”; Ishmael working on nets imagines it all as “the Loom of Time” and himself as “a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates”) and in longer passages like Father Mapple’s sermon. Matthiessen also recognizes that Melville’s ability (in Coleridge’s words about Thomas Browne) to metamorphose “everything, be it... Read more

Narcissus

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

Melville, simplistically, claimed that the myth of Narcissus was the key to Moby Dick: “still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.” Read more

Melville and American Adam

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:10 am By Peter Leithart

I’ve summarized some of David W. Noble’s analysis of Moby Dick ( The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden ) in the past, but the notes below highlight Noble’s take on the religio-political themes of Melville’s novel. Ishmael, he notes, begins the novel looking for redemption in the sea. Not only does this suggest a hope for quasi-baptismal renewal, but it also represents an attempt to “to recapitulate the exodus of his ancestors from the crowded cities of Europe,... Read more

Establishing the law

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

Tertullian ( Against Marcion , 4.16) offers an interesting explanation of the consistency of Jesus’ teaching with that of the lex talionis : “He who counselled that an injury should be forgotten, was still more likely to counsel the patient endurance of it. But then, when He said. ‘Vengeance is ming, and I will repay,’ He thereby teaches that patience calmly waits for the infliction of vengeance. Therefore, inasmuch as it is incredible that the same (God) should seem to... Read more

In Defense of Liturgical Stammering

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

Catherine Pickstock, describing view of modern Catholic liturgical reformers, writes, “The mediaeval Latin liturgy seemed to consist in disorienting ambiguous overlappings between the stages of advance toward the altar of God, and a lack of clarity in the identification of the worshipers and the priest. Its repeated rites of purification and pitiful requests for mercy and assistance apparently laid a morbid and all too Augustinian emphasis on the worshipers’ guilt, whereas the reformers favoured a recovery of the Greek Fathers’... Read more

Why “Mass”?

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

The name “Mass” comes from the final dismissal: Ite, missa est: Go, it is a dismissal. Jungmann explains: “it is puzzling indeed that, as a matter of fact, it has been designated by a separating , a going apart . Such, however, appears to be the case in regard to the word which both in Latin and in the modern languages of the West has practically supplanted all other names, the word missa , ‘Mass.’ For today there is no... Read more

Secret liturgy

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

In his recent Worship as a Revelation , Laurence Hemming rightly says that the early church took its liturgical cues from the temple (citing Margaret Barker’s books). But then he adds: Not only because of persecution, but also because “what was so sacred was not to be publicly spoken of or openly discussed . . . much of the historical record is allusive, only elliptically explained, if it is explicated at all.” But Leviticus explains exactly what happens in the... Read more