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The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)
Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)
The Four: A Survey of the Gospels
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
One of the most heartening developments in the Reformed world in the past two decades is the renewal of interest in the Mercersberg movement. And one of the most heartening developments within that development is Wipf & Stock’s plan to publish a multi-volume collection of Mercersberg theology, under the general editorship of my hyperenergetic friend Brad Littlejohn. You can hear Brad talk about the project here: http://trinitytalkradio.com/2012/05/mercersburg-theology-with-brad-littlejohn/.
Some of the material to be published has not been published since it appeared in the Mercersberg Review in the 19th century, but the first volume in the series is a fresh edition of Nevin’s classic The Mystical Presence: And the Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper (Mercersburg Theology Study), with thorough newly written introductions, explanatory notes, translations, etc. Get it, study it, and look for the future volumes in the series over the next few years.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at 1:43 pm
Tournier (Escape from Loneliness.
He sees it going the other direction too:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at 1:33 pm
In his Escape from Loneliness. (pp. 22-3)
He observes that pastors discuss theology, church affairs, and even pastoral care, but “they practice no mutual pastoral care. They struggle alone with their inextricable family problems, with their temptations, with the guilt of their secret faults, never daring to unburden themselves to their colleagues or to their parishioners because they are afraid of being condemned or of causing a scandal. I have known one pastor who used to confess to a priest in order to find inner peace.”
I wonder if this is a constant of church life, or if there’s something peculiar to modern Christianity, or Protestantism in particular, that creates the sad situation Tournier describes.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at 1:22 pm
Phenomenology, especially in its Heideggerian variety, attempts to overcome the modern obsession with epistemology and return us to being, to ontology. What Heidegger in fact seems to do is overcome the divide between epistemology and ontology so that philosophy is both at the same time, but neither in their usual senses.
If a thing is in its self-presentation, as Heidegger says, if the truth of a thing is its unveiling, then being and being-known are pretty much two ways to describe the same thing. This isn’t exactly epistemology anymore, because it doesn’t assume a subject-object dualism; it’s not exactly ontology anymore either, for the same reason. From Heidegger’s perspective, epistemology was parasitic on ontology scoured of epistemology, and vice versa.
Two theological observations: First, the notion that things are self-presentation seems to be one way to formulate the biblical notion that creation is God’s speech. Things communicate themselves because they are the language of God’s communication to us. Second, the notion that a thing is its self-presentation sure sounds a lot like the Father’s being in His self-presenting Word.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at 7:50 am
Hezekiah is named in the first verse of Isaiah, but then disappears for the first 35 chapters. He comes on stage in person in chapters 36-39, but then disappears again for the rest of the book. We often read Isaiah’s portrayal in the light of the portrayal in 2 Kings, but it is a helpful exercise to examine the portrayal found in Isaiah itself.
One of the interesting effects of this internal reading is how little information we have about Hezekiah. So far as the reader of Isaiah knows, when Hezekiah appears at the beginning of chapter 36, he is an identical twin of his vacillating, compromised father Ahaz. When the Rabshakeh takes his position in the same place as Isaiah did in Isaiah 7, it seems we are set up for a repeat of Ahaz’s faithlessness.
Much of what we know of Hezekiah’s reign as king comes from the Rabshakeh rather than from Isaiah himself.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, May 14, 2012 at 6:12 am
INTRODUCTION
When the Assyrians first threatened Hezekiah, he went to the temple to get tribute to pay the Assyrian king (2 Kings 18:13-16). When Sennacherib invades, Hezekiah again goes to the temple, this time to pray (Isaiah 37:1, 14-20). He is the only king in Judah’s history to use the temple properly – as a house of prayer for all nations.
THE TEXT
“And it came to pass, when king Hezekiah heard it, that he rent his clothes, and covered himself with sackcloth, and went into the house of the Lord. And he sent Eliakim, who was over the household, and Shebna the scribe, and the elders of the priests covered with sackcloth, unto Isaiah the prophet the son of Amoz. . . .” (Isaiah 37:1-38).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, May 14, 2012 at 5:02 am
The Rabshakeh’s second speech and the response to it (Isaiah 36:13-37:7) is structured chiastically:
A. Hear! Thus says the great king Sennacherib, vv 13-14a
B. Don’t let Hezekiah deceive you, v 14b
C. Don’t let Hezekiah make you trust Yahweh, v 15-16a
D. Thus says the king of Assyria: A promised land, vv 16b-17
C’. Don’t let Hezekiah deceive you into trusting Yahweh, vv 18-20
B’. Silence, mourning, prayer from delegation and Hezekiah, 36:21-37:4
A’. Thus says Yahweh, who hears, 37:5-7
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 12:34 pm
The story of Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem turns on hearing – who hears what and what do they do in response.
The issue gets raised initially by the delegation from Hezekiah that meets with the Rabshakeh at the conduit of the upper pool. When the Rabshakeh speaks to them in street Hebrew, they ask him to speak instead to speak in the lingua franca of the day, Aramean (Isaiah 36:11). The literate officials can “hear” Aramean, but the mean on the wall cannot. They want to be able to spin the message from Sennacherib, not let it get unedited to the people, who might be unsettled by it.
The Rabshakeh refuses to comply, and instead continues to speak in “Judaean.” His first word to the men on the wall is the plural of shema: “Hear (O Israel), the words of the great king” (v. 13). He warns them not to “hear” Hezekiah (v. 16). The Judean delegation says nothing, but they report back so that King Hezekiah “hears” (37:1). He tears his clothes, and enters the temple, but he goes in the hope that Yahweh has “heard” the words of the Rabshakeh (37:4). Isaiah assures Hezekiah that Yahweh has heard (37:22-23).
Yahweh’s response is to put something in the ear of Sennacherib: He will “hear” a rumor that will make him scramble back to his own land (37:7). Yahweh is an eavesdropper on the original diplomatic gathering. He hears, marks, and acts. The God who calls Israel to hear Himself hears, and saves.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 11:54 am
My son Christian writes poetry and other things at http://pushlings.com/. Take a look.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 7:25 am
In Isaiah 22, Yahweh threatens the house steward (the word is based on sakan, to dwell with or befriend) Shebna, warning him that he will be removed from his place, rolled like a ball, and thrown out into the countryside. He is replaced by Eliakim ben Hilkiah, who is given a tunic and key as a sign of his authority in the house of David.
The same two names appear in Isaiah 36:3: The very same Eliakim ben Hilkiah is sent out as part of a delegation to the Rabshakeh of Assyria, and along with him is one “Shebna the scribe.” This might be the same Shebna, demoted from house steward to scribe; or it might be another. Regardless, the presence of the same two names in the two passages hints at a connection between them.
The first passage, Isaiah 22, describes a demotion and promotion, and ends with the promise that the one with the key of David will open and shut at will (v. 22). Eliakim’s reappearance in chapter 36 is promising: He opens so that no one can shut, and he shuts a no one can open – a good skill set to have when the Assyrians are banging at the gates of your city. Eliakim’s presence suggests that, no matter how powerful Sennacherib’s army may be, he will not be able to get through a gate that Eliakim has locked. As the steward of the royal house, further, Eliakim is a peg in a firm place, a peg on which the Lord will hang the glory of David’s house (vv. 23-24). Again, his presence in the delegation is a reassurance: So long as Eliakim is the house steward, the glory of David’s house will be intact, since Eliakim will be “a throne of glory in his father’s house” (v. 23). Someday, the peg will give way (v. 25) but not yet.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 7:17 am
As I noted in a post a year and a half ago, Isaiah and the Rabshakeh stand in the same place, “by the conduit of the upper pool on the highway of the fuller’s field” (Isaiah 7:3; 36:2). The phrase resonates with promises of protection and blessing: “Pool” is berekah, a pun on the word for “blessing,” and “upper” is elyon, as in el elyon, God Most High.
What is the import of this parallel? Mainly, it sorts out the characters. Isaiah and the Rabshakeh stand in the same place, and the Rabshakeh actually says much the same thing that Isaiah has been saying about Assyria and the folly of relying on Egypt. At the same time, the parallel scenes highlight parallels between Ahaz, whom Isaiah confronts at the conduit of the upper pool, and Hezekiah, who sends a delegation to meet with the Rabshakeh in the same location.
The two prophets (Isaiah and the Rabshakeh) are linked; so are the two kings, and their situations, in that both are threatened by Gentile powers. Isaiah promises that the kings who threaten Ahaz will be removed, and offers a sign; Rabshakeh warns that Jerusalem is doomed, but in the following chapter Isaiah reappears and offers a sign (37:30). The main point regarding the kings is one of contrast: Ahaz refuses the sign and doesn’t trust Yahweh or His prophet. Hezekiah turns to Yahweh in the midst of the siege and is delivered.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 6:58 am
In Isaiah 36, Sennacherib comes on the scene “ascending” (‘alah). He “went up” to Jerusalem. At the end of the narrative, though, he returns, descending back to Nineveh where he came from. Jesus’ story is descent followed by ascent; other kings ascend first, then descend.
Isaiah 37:37 describes Sennacherib’s departure with four verbs: He departed, went, returned, dwelt. The fourfold repetition emphasizes the completeness of the departure; the whole land to the four corners weas cleared of Assyrians.
But the sequence also suggests an exodus motif. ”Departed” translates nasa’, used in the story of Israel’s journey from Egypt (Exodus 12:37; 13:20; 15:22; 16:1). ”Went” translates the colorless and common verb yalak, “walk,” which also appears in the Exodus story (Exodus 12:28, 31, 32; 13:21; 15:22). In leaving Egypt, and especially in the second exodus from Babylon, Israel “returns” (shub) to the land of the fathers. And the whole point of the exodus is to go to the place where Yahweh dwells, to build the house for Yahweh at the foot of Sinai (cf. Exodus 15:17); so too Sennacherib “dwells” at Nineveh long enough to be killed in the “house of Nisroch his god” (Isaiah 37:38).
After the “Passover” at Jerusalem, when the angel of death kills 185,000 Assyrians, Assyria departs, goes, returns, dwells. It is an inverted exodus, not a march of triumph but a slinking away in defeat. Judah doesn’t move at all, yet they are the ones that are genuinely delivered, they “depart, go, return, dwell” in safety.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 5:00 am
In The Living and True God: The Mystery of the Trinity (New Revised Edition) (p. 54)
Still, strictly, if God is not part of a genus, nothing in God is an individual in a genus either. It is not as if there is a general category of “person” into which the Father, Son, and Spirit all fit. Perhaps failure to recognize the analogical distance in the use of the word “Person” as it relates to each of the three contributed to the unitarian slant of some Western Trinitarian theology. For if each is “person” in precisely the same way, then there has to be an overarching singular category.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, May 9, 2012 at 4:38 pm
“Why is the Tetragrammaton kept separate from other names?” Luther asks. ”Can it be so sacred, and other names so profane, that it is polluted when brought into contact with them? Such would be the fictions of the Jews.”
No Kabbalist he. Yet, he goes on:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, May 9, 2012 at 4:18 pm
Christianity brought the “end of sacrifice,” the replacement of the bloody animal sacrifices of paganism and Judaism with the sacrificial feast of the Eucharist.
But not quite the end, or at least not quite everywhere. In a 1903 article, Fred Conybeare explored the “survival of animal sacrifices inside the Christian church.” The Armenian church is a case in point. When King Irdat was converted by the preaching of Gregory the Illuminator, himself the scion of the “leading pagan priestly family” that had made chief pagan shrine part of the family estate, Gregory gave advice regarding the distribution of sacrificial perquisites to Christian priests: “Your portions of the offerings shall be the hide and right-hand parts of the spine, the limb and fat, and the tail and heart and lobe of lungs, and the tripe with the lard; of the ribs and shank-bones a part, the tongue and the right ear, and the right eye and all the secret parts.”
This custom long outlasted the age of Gregory, which was the age of Diocletian.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, May 9, 2012 at 6:42 am
Who else but Cyril O’Regan to write the essay on Hegel’s Trinitarian theology in The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity (Oxford Handbooks in Religion)
On the plus side (sort of): “Hegel makes the symbol or ‘representation’ (Vorstellung) of the Trinity central once against for Protestant theology by regarding it as nothing less than the symbol of symbols.” But this plus is soon negated: “Thought rightly, the symbol of the Trinity is not a dogmatic abstraction; rather it is the perfect symbol for a dynamic, self-differentiating divine who necessarily becomes in and through history.” On the plus side, philosophically “the symbol corrects for various forms of monism”; and theologically “it legitimates Christianity over other religions which are unable to synthesize unity and plurality, stasis and becoming. More specifically, it validates Christianity over other monotheistic faiths, and in doing do determines them to be unphilosophical, that is, not capable of being assimilated by and justified within a self-authenticating conceptual network.” Yet, on the negative side, “Hegel makes it plain that he has no time for a tri-personal divine, which he deems to reduce to tritheism.”
Despite his regular insistence that he was a faithful Lutheran, Hegel is in the end a Trinitarian heretic, and O’Regan lists five crucial departures from Lutheran orthodoxy:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 5:00 pm
Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering have assembled a star-studded collection of contributors for their The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity (Oxford Handbooks in Religion)
Samuel M. Powell writes the chapter on 19th-century Protestant Trinitarian thought, which, contrary to some reports, did actually exist. His treatment of Schleiermacher helpfully exposes both the strengths and weaknesses of his work (pp. 270-2).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 4:45 pm
“When did destiny become manifest?” asks Ernest Lee Tuveson in his classic Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Midway Reprint Series)
At the end of his discussion, Tuveson (pp. 134-6) makes a revealing comparison of the American sense of destiny with the Russian legend of the white cowl. According to the legend, Constantine made and gave a white cowl to Pope Sylvester, which was passed on to the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1054. When a later Pope demanded the return of the cowl, Pope Sylvester appeared in a dream to the Patriarch and told him to send it to Novgorod, to the land that “will be called Radiant Russia, which, by the Grace of God, will be glorified with blessings” and will eventually “become more honorable than the two Romes which preceded it.” This legend of a translatio imperii is the “cornerstone of Russian national ideology,” and Tuveson thinks it bears comparison with the notion that America is the purified version of Britain, since Britain, “although the pioneer of the Reformation, . . . failed to fulfill its task.”
Similar as the two ideologies are, they produce very different nationalisms and national missions:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 4:31 pm
INTRODUCTION
We want help making a decision, guidance for marriage and child-rearing, instructions about how to overcome sin. In response, God gives us a book full of genealogies, architectural blueprints and procedures for offering sacrifice, narratives of ancient history. The Bible doesn’t merely teach us lessons. God gave it to forge our memories, open our eyes, and stretch our imaginations.
THE TEXT
“Now it came to pass in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah that Sennacherib king of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and took them. Then the king of Assyria sent the Rabshakeh with a great army. . . .” (Isaiah 36:1-37:7).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, May 7, 2012 at 5:47 am
Isaiah’s account of Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem is organized in a neat chiasm:
A. Sennacherib’s invasion and the Rabshakeh’s message, 26:1-22
B. Hezekiah goes to temple, Isaiah prophesies, 37:1-7
A’/C. The Rabshakeh’s boast is repeated in a letter, 37:8-13
B’. Hezekiah goes to temple, Isaiah prophesies, 37:14-35
A’. Sennacherib driven from the land, 37:36-38
The structure highlights the fact that the turning point of the story is the Rabshakeh’s decision to record his boast against Yahweh in writing. Jerusalem’s deliverance depends on Hezekiah’s response to the blasphemy; but Jerusalem’s deliverance depends even more on the blasphemy itself. As Yahweh says at the climax of Isaiah’s second prophecy, “I will defend this city to save it for My own sake and for My servant David’s sake” (37:35). As soon as the Rabshakeh puts his boast in written form, the salvation of Jerusalem and the Davidic kingdom is assured.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, May 7, 2012 at 5:09 am
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