The Last Theocrats

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

In his controversial book, The Stillborn God , Mark Lilla suggests that nineteenth-century German liberalism attempted to raise political theology from the grave to which it had been consigned since Hobbes. Their political theology had little to recommend it. Charlotte Allen sums up in her Weekly Standard review: “The liberal experiment in equating one’s being a good Christian or Jew with being a productive citizen of secularized German society failed spectacularly in the trenches of World War I and the... Read more

Roman Death

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

Andrew Feldherr writes in the TLS that Romans were known by the way they died, as well as how they killed. Not only individual Romans either: “The Romans as a people ‘decline and fall’; and their collective role as the West’s memento mori continues in the stream of recent books that imply the collapse of American society merely by comparing it to Rome.” Feldherr is reviewing Catherine Edwards’s recent Death in Ancient Rome (Yale), which argues that Romans considered death... Read more

Old Hat

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:05 am By Peter Leithart

John Joseph writes in the TLS that Saussure’s insight that language is “purely differential and negative in nature” was a commonplace of late nineteenth-century philosophy and “was a defining feature of British psychology.” And Saussure’s claim that meaning is arbitrary and conventional also has a long pedigree. Saussure’s “novel contribution was to imagine the sound side of language on the one hand, and the conceptual side on the other, as perfectly alike in their nature and mental operations. This is... Read more

Impassibility

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

In a recent book on the “suffering of the impassible God,” Paul Gavrilyuk defends the patristic consensus that God is impassible, focusing on the ways that the church struggled to maintain the tension of the incarnation between the God who is impassible and the suffering Jesus who is God. In his Pro Ecclesia review, John O’Keefe notes that impassibility was not a “major preoccupation” of the patristic writers, an observes that it tends to come up in specific settings: “The... Read more

Christological soteriology

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:49 pm By Peter Leithart

DH Williams has a helpful article on justification by faith in Hilary, in a recent issue of Pro Ecclesia . He concludes, in part, “the basis of justification by faith was not at heart a matter of soteriology, but of Christology, especially when it came to interpreting the divine intent and benefits of the Incarnation . . . . The reality of one’s salvation was only as good as the divine being who secures it. Just as it is true... Read more

Starbucked

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

P.J. O’Rourke has a typically entertaining and sharp review of Taylor Clark’s recent Starbucked in the NYT book review. O’Rourke especially appreciates Clark’s honest in answering whether Starbucks is a “monster of capitalist rapine.” Some excerpts: “Clark is frank about his bias: ‘Starbucks diminishes the world’s diversity every time it builds a new cafe, and I can’t help but feel troubled by this.’ But when Clark looks at whether the towering Mount St. Helens that is Starbucks, with its volcanic... Read more

Sermon Outline, Fourth Advent

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:01 am By Peter Leithart

INTRODUCTION Micah addresses an Israel filled with injustice, ruled by cannibal kings. And he prophesies that Jerusalem will be reduced to ruins (3:12). Yet, the heart of his prophecy is a message of hope – hope for the restoration of Jerusalem, hope for a king who will be peace (5:5). THE TEXT “Now it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains, and shall... Read more

Eucharistic meditation, Third Advent

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:39 pm By Peter Leithart

Micah 3: Hear now, O heads of Jacob, and you rulers of the house of Israel: Is it not for you to know justice? You who hate good and love evil; who strip the skin from My people, and the flesh from their bones; who also eat the flesh of My people, flay their skin from them, break their bones, and chop them in pieces like meat for the pot, like flesh in the caldron. We saw in the sermon... Read more

Exhortation, Third Advent

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

Doctrine matters, and no doctrine matters more than the doctrines concerning Jesus Christ. One of the earliest and most intense controversies in the early church had to do with Arianism. Arius taught that the Son of God was not equal to the Father, not eternal God, but only a very exalted and powerful creature. He was not always with the Father, but there was when he was not. So what? What does it matter whether Jesus was the eternal consubstantial... Read more

Wedding sermon

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

I am reading a portion of the text from 2 Corinthians 4. We have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves; we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.... Read more