1 & 2 Kings

Peter J. Leithart, October 22, 2007

Uriah Y Kim reviews my Kings commentary in a recent issue of Reviews in Religion and Theology. He's got some criticisms, but overall it's a fair review. A couple of responses on specific points:

1) He thinks my contention that there is a "seventh-king" pattern is suspect; my counting is off: "If the line of Judean kings starts with Solomon, then Ahaziah is the seventh king; however, if the sequence starts with David or even Saul, then Ahaziah is not the seventh king. Manasseh is the seventh king after Ahaziah only if one does not count the reign of Athaliah." OK, sure. But Kings begins with Solomon (reasonably making him #1), and the text itself treats Athaliah as a queen that "does not count" - no formulaic beginning and ending to her reign.

2) He says, "It appears to this reviewer that Leithart longs for the 'good old days' when the Western orthodoxy was unquestioned. He avoids the messy condition of the present, in which irruptions of various Christian communities and voices that demand attention to the present
condition rather than looking nostalgically to the past or hopefully to
the eschatological future." I may not have done it justice, but a central concern of the commentary was precisely to give a theological perspective on the "messy condition" of the contemporary church. I may be more wistful than I think I am, but I had no intention to evoke nostalgia for the good old days.

3) He complains about my treatment of evangelical/mainline churches: "He views 'American fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals' as the remnant, the true Israel, but admonishes them for separating themselves from 'the false church in the mainline' (p. 125)." Nope, not at all. The section he quotes begins with the claim that "American fundamentals and conservative evangelicals . . . regard themselves as the remnant, the true Israel, separated from the false church in the mainline." The whole point of that paragraph is to challenge this conservative self-understanding.