Pannenberg on Trinity

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

In his book on the Trinity, Veli-Matti Karkkainen has a concise summary of Pannenberg’s Trinitarian theology. He begins by noting that Pannenberg’s entire program for theology is to establish the “truth of Christian doctrine.” Theology is a public discipline that aims to establish universal truth claims. He protests against the “timidity” of modern theology, which concedes public discourse to non-theological factors and relegates “God-talk to religious experience and the subjective realm.” (more…) Read more

Church as public assembly

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

In his sociological history of Christian worship, Martin Stringer examines the process of “Christianization” in the early church as a process of Christian colonization of space. Among other things, he notes that “Christian architecture differed in a number of significant ways from the religious architecture of pagan religions. Most pagan temples contained a small inner sacred space that was restricted to the priests, and were surrounded by more public arcades, walkways, and squares. For the Christians the inner space had... Read more

Kissing Christ

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:46 pm By Peter Leithart

In his social history of Christian liturgy, Lutheran liturgist Frank Senn describes the invention of the pax board in England during the 13th century: “This popular practice was welcomed by the clergy and disseminated throughout Christendom by the Franciscans. The pax board was a cross or painted picture of Christ, which the priest kissed after the greeting Pax domini sit semper vobiscum (The peace of the Lord be with you always). It was then kissed by another minister or the... Read more

Sermon notes

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

INTRODUCTION Raising children is a way of throwing out a line to the future. It is inherently an act of faith, an effort to outlive ourselves. That’s true of all parenting. But Christian parents need to exercise the full range of theological virtues: faith, hope, and love (1 Corinthians 13:13). This wee we look at faith. THE TEXT “When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram and said to him, ‘I am Almighty God; walk before Me... Read more

Evangelical Reform

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:40 pm By Peter Leithart

In 1536, nearly twenty years after Luther posted the 95 Theses on the church door at Wittenberg, Pope Paul III announced a plan to call a general council to deal with the issues raised by Luther and other Reformers. Despite being excommunicated by the Catholic church a decade earlier, Luther still hoped that a general council that would evaluate his teaching fairly. During the mid-1530s, Martin Luther – then in his fifties – suffered a string of illnesses, including kidney... Read more

Education Reform

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

“When we were boys,” an editor lamented, “boys had to do a little work in school. They were not coaxed; they were hammered. Spelling, writing, and arithmetic were not electives, and you had to learn. In these more fortunate times, elementary education has become in many places a vaudeville show. The child must be kept amused, and do what he pleases. Many sage teachers scorn the old-fashioned rudiments, and it seems to be regarded as between a misfortune and a... Read more

Vico Pro Romanticism

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:50 pm By Peter Leithart

According to Verene, Vico’s emphasis on child psychology makes him “the authentic precursor of Rousseau” and also a forerunner of Romanticism: “Misleading as may be the view that Vico was an outright pre-Romanticist, there is a whole aspect of the German Romantic movement of which he seems to have been the ancestor (via Herder, perhaps): that aspect which stresses poetical imagination, the fairy tale, the ‘primitive,’ the creative unconscious. It is with this aspect of Vico’s revaluation and rehabilitation of... Read more

Vico Contra Dialectic

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:50 pm By Peter Leithart

Vico was not opposed to logic, but thought that its centrality in modern educational systems was damaging: “it throws into utter confusion, in our adolescents, those powers of the youthful mind each of which should be regulated by a systematic study of specific subject matters; as, for instance, memory by the study of languages, imagination by the reading of poets, historians, and orators, and wit by instruction in linear geometry . . . . (more…) Read more

Vico Contra Descartes

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:50 pm By Peter Leithart

Donald Verene writes that Vico’s opposition to Descartes and Cartesian thought rests on a “different conception of man.” For Vico, humans are “an integrality (not sheer rationality, not mere intellect, but also fantasy, passion, emotion),” and Verene also remarks on Vico’s “insistence on the historical and social dimension” of human existence. The last is Vico’s great contribution, his “vindication of the historical dimension of man.” Verene sums up the difference between Descartes and Vico as the difference between the mathematician... Read more

Evangelical sacraments

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:40 pm By Peter Leithart

In his Schmalkald Articles (1538), Luther begins with a brief statement about justification through Christ by faith. Later in the articles he returns to the issue of the gospel, and intriguingly introduces the sacraments as one of the “helps” that God provides against sin: “We now want to return to the gospel, which gives more than just one kind of counsel and help against sin; because God is overwhelmingly rich in his grace: first, through the spoken word, in which... Read more