Freethinkers and Priests

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

Isabel Rivers (Volume 2 of Reason, Grace, and Sentiment ) has a superb summary of the freethinkers’ account of the corruption of religion. In its origins, religion was “plain, easy, true” and was rooted in and expressed “nature.” But this was diverted “by priests, who, motivated by greed and playing on men’s fears of the unknown, have invented fables, mysteries, rites, ceremonies, and sacrifices and have made themselves indispensable to the performance of religious duties, thus converting religion int superstition... Read more

Kant’s Allegory

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:45 pm By Peter Leithart

Ian Hunter ( Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany ) notes that Kant’s “philosophical biblical hermeneutics” is “the intellectual method or spiritual exercise through which his rational theology performs the core task of university metaphysics.” Hunter elaborates that this task is “reconciling moral philosophy and revealed theology within a single discipline in accordance with the apologetic purposes of Christian metaphysics itself. Hence, if Kant places his philosophical interpretation of the Bible outside the bounds of scriptural... Read more

John Toland

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:45 pm By Peter Leithart

Among the many delightful character sketches in Paul Hazard’s The European Mind, 1680-1715 is this Chestertonian riff on John Toland (notorious author of Christianity not mysterious ): “He had taken his M. A. at Glasgow; he had studied at Edinburgh, Leyden and Oxford. He had delved into ancient history, only to discover that it was one colossal imposture and that its chroniclers were, one and all, a pack of deceivers. The Scriptures he had gone into, only to inform us... Read more

Cudworth’s Trinity

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:51 pm By Peter Leithart

Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth offered a novel defense of the doctrine of the Trinity, under assault during the seventeenth century. He thought those who attacked the doctrine and those who defended were both wrong to treat it as a “revealed mystery.” Cudworth thought it was a piece of natural theology. Both are “confuted from hence, because the most ingenious and acute of all the Pagan philosophers, the Platonists and the Pythagoreans, who had no bias at all impose upon their... Read more

Saving Knowledge

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

Peter Harrison ( ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment ) argues that there was an epochal change in the understanding of Christianity during the seventeenth century. Over the protests of such puritans as Robert Harris and Richard Baxter, who argued for what Harris called “true religion in the old way ” of faith and love, English writers increasingly attempted “to encapsulate in propositional form the essence of ‘the Christian Religion,’ ‘the Protestant Religion,’ the true Catholic Religion,’ or... Read more

Sermon notes

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

INTRODUCTION Even after Jesus has fed 4000 men, along with women and children ( 15:32 -39), the Pharisees and Sadducees aren’t satisfied. They want a “sign from heaven” (16:1). The disciples don’t understand either, and Jesus has to remind them of His power to give bread (16:8-11). THE TEXT “Then the Pharisees and Sadducees came, and testing Him asked that He would show them a sign from heaven. He answered and said to them, ‘When it is evening you say,... Read more

Living witnesses

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

Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses is full of intriguing information and innovative arguments. At least the arguments look innovative in the context of contemporary NT scholarship. In any other context, they look like common sense. Like this: “We [NT scholars] have become accustomed to working with models of oral tradition as it is passed down through the generations in traditional communities. We imagine the traditions passing through many minds and mouths before they reached the writers of the Gospels.”... Read more

Who’s not at Lambeth

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

David Virtue has a long, long list of non-participants at Lambeth, many representing the most vibrant portions of the Anglican communion. He estimates that 450-500 Anglican bishops are missing. Read more

Not Saussure continued

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

Freundlieb offers several criticisms of Saussure’s notion that language is purely differential. First, “If the meaning of a term could not be specified positively but only in relation to (all the?) other terms in the lexicon, no one could ever learn the vocabulary of a language, except in one stroke as it were.” Obviously, this is not the case. He goes on: “Furthermore, there is now a considerable body of em- pirical evidence that human categorization-in spite of the variability... Read more

Saussure on languagee and thought

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

In an article in Poetics Today , Dieter Freundlieb notes that “Saussure argues that ‘in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system’ . . . While Saussure himself does not specifically address this issue, it seems to follow from his theory that languages ‘carve up’ reality in... Read more

What did Moses' staff turn into as a sign for Pharaoh?