Triumph of the Unchurched

Last updated on: March 23, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Molly Ball’s Atlantic piece on “America’s empty-church problem” is a must-read. It provides a penetrating, and sobering analysis of the political shifts that came to the surface in the 2016 Presidential election. Trump’s election was not, she argues, the triumph of the religious right or the right’s victory in the culture wars. Church attendance and traditional religious practice has been declining and continues to. Between 1992 and 2014 the proportion of religiously “unaffiliated” Americans rose from 6 to 22%, and... Read more

Multiconfessional Communion

Last updated on: March 23, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Beginning in 1559, the magistrates of the German city of Wesel, in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, required the citizens to commune together (Jesse Spohnholz, “Multiconfessional Celebration of the Eucharist in Sixteenth-Century Wesel”). The city had been the site of intra-Lutheran struggles, and Calvinist immigrants were moving in. Worried about public peace, city leaders forced intercommunion in order to bind different groups into one. They adopted an evangelical liturgy (1559) drafted by Hermann von Wied in consultation with Martin Bucer. It... Read more

Salvation by Allegiance

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

Matthew Bates argues in Salvation by Allegiance Alone that “our contemporary Christian culture often comes prepackaged with functional ideas and operative definitions of belief, faith, works, salvation, heaven, and the gospel that in various ways truncate and distort the full message of the good news about Jesus the Messiah that is proclaimed in the Bible.” The gospel message is distorted when it focuses on the cross to the exclusion of the resurrection and ascension, and when it fails to see... Read more

Just Globalization

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

In the blink of an eye, globalization has changed from the inevitable future and the panacea for all human ills to a curse word and the source of all American misery. It takes guts to speak up for globalization these days. Brent Waters has guts. He no doubt began writing his Just Capitalism before the most recent outbreak of anti-globalization, but his book couldn’t be more relevant. His claims are modest. He argues that today’s global capitalism and globalization are... Read more

Kings, Chronicles, Temple

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

After summarizing recent work on temple building in the Ancient Near East (1 & 2 Chronicles, 227–229), Mark Boda takes note of the differences between the accounts of Solomon’s temple building in Kings and Chronicles, with an eye to the question of whether or not the Chronicler is following ANE precedent. Scholars have suggested that “Chronicles appears to be more closely allied with the ancient ritual structure than its source in Kings” (230). Among the features of the Chronicler’s account... Read more

Beyond Asking

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

Paul said that God gives us abundantly more than we can ask or imagine, according to the resurrection power of Jesus in us (Ephesians 3:20). Solomon could have told us as much. When Yahweh appears to Solomon at Gibeon, He offers to give the king whatever he asks (2 Chronicles 1). When Solomon asks for wisdom, Yahweh responds chiastically (vv. 11–12): A. Because you did not ask for riches, wealth, honour, life of those who hate you, long life, B.... Read more

Non-Americans in American Policy

Last updated on: March 17, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Next door at First Things, James Rogers asks, “Does the welfare of non-Americans count in the creation of U.S. economic policy? Secondly, to what extent, if at all, should it count?” Or, more fully: “Responding to the impact of globalization on U.S. workers by increasing tariffs and/or trade barriers involves making tradeoffs between the lives of Americans and the lives of workers overseas. We can’t pretend otherwise. How should Christians respond to this tradeoff?” He gives an exceedingly wise answer.... Read more

Goodness of Authority

Last updated on: March 17, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Without authority, Yves Simon argues (A General Theory of Authority), our efforts at collective action would be stymied: “decisions concerning the common action of a multitude could be taken unanimously, at least under the ideal conditions of a community made up of intelligent and virtuous persons alone. This is not the case, because contingency prevents us from knowing exhaustively the factors with which our decisions is concerned and from predicting their future with any kind of certainty. In the complex... Read more

The Weeping Animal

Last updated on: March 17, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Despite efforts to show that animals cry, Robert Provine (Curious Behavior) argues that “dispassionate evaluation of evidence indicates that neither elephants nor chimpanzees, our primate cousins, shed an emotional tear. The exclusivity of humankind’s crown jewels— language, laughter, and tool use— has been challenged, but emotional tearing still stands as a uniquely human trait. Even human newborns don’t gain membership in the emotional tear club until several weeks or months after birth. Emotional tears are a universally understood and uniquely... Read more

God the Temple

Last updated on: March 17, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The Bible is a narrative of architecture and city planning. The Creator is a divine architect and builder. On earth, He is first a landscape architect, designing and planning a garden, then a designer of tents and temples, finally an architect of people who builds a church of living stones. Revelation 21 contains the last vision of the house of God. It is a city-made-temple, an urban space that resembles the inner sanctuary of the temple. It is full of... Read more