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Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen
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
Jesus is described twice in Revelation as the “root of David” (5:5; 22:16). “Son of David” or “Seed of David” makes sense; Jesus comes from the Davidic line. But Jesus is not only the fruit, but the root of the Davidic house. He is the original Anointed One before who David stood, the Lord to whom Yahweh promised a seat at His right hand.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, May 3, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Jesus chooses a couple of sets of brothers to be among the Twelve: Andrew and Peter, James and John. Plus, there’s Thomas the Twin.
Why did Jesus do this? Possibly, because the Old Testament so often shows us brothers in conflict, especially older brothers hating and abusing younger brothers, while the younger brothers triumph. For the New Testament brothers, we don’t even know which brother is the older one. We just know that brothers are following Jesus together. Jesus comes to divide families, but ultimately to bring peace and reconciliation, to turn the hearts of fathers back to children, of children to the fathers, of brother to brother.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, April 3, 2008 at 4:34 am
Brueggemann again. He writes as if power were necessarily oppressive, but with some qualifications he has a profound point:
“The replacing of numbness with compassion, that is, the end of cynical indifference and the beginning of noticed pain, signals a social revolution. . . . The capacity of feel the hurt of the marginal people means an end to all social arrangements that nullified pain by a remarkable depth of numbness.”
Jesus’ compassion embodies this opposition to the “dominant culture”: “the one thing the dominant culture cannot tolerate or co-opt is compassion, the ability to stand in solidarity with the victims of the present order. It can manage charity and good intentions, but it has no way to resist solidarity with pain or grief. . . . The imperial consciousness lives by its capacity to still the groans and to go on with business as usual as thought none were hurting and there were no groans. If the groans become audible, if they can be heard in the streets and markets and court, then the consciousness of domination is already jeopardized. . . . Newness comes precisely from expressed pain. Suffering made audible and visible produces hope, articulated grief is the gate of newness, and the history of Jesus is the history of entering into pain and giving it voice.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, March 21, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Walter Brueggemann (Prophetic Imagination) cites Hannah Arendt’s claim that Jesus’ offer of forgiveness was his “most endangering action because if a society does not have an apparatus for forgiveness, then its members are fated to live forever with the consequences of any violation. Thus the refusal to forgive sin (or the management of the machinery of forgiveness) amounts to enormous social control. While the claims of Jesus may have been religiously staggering, its threat to the forms of accepted social control was even greater.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, March 21, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Augustine points out that the eclipse during Jesus’ death was not a natural occurrence, since Jesus’ death took place at Passover and eclipses normally take place only in the “last quarter of the moon.”
So, why did the Lord rearrange the cycles of the heavens for this purpose? The symbolism on one level is obvious: The Sun/Son is being eclipsed in His death, only to rise on the third morning. But if it was indeed an eclipse, the symbolism deepens. The moon is the light of the night, symbolizing the Old Covenant, the covenant of Passover and new moon festivals. The sun is the light of the day, the dawning day of the New Covenant. For three days between Jesus’ death and resurrection, the Old eclipsed the New, symbolized by the three-hour eclipse (Matthew 27:45) during Jesus’ crucifixion. In the end, darkness could not overcome the light.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, January 25, 2008 at 6:13 am
Cyril of Jerusalem wrote: “But Jesus, son of Nave, was a type of Him in many things; for when he began to rule the people, he began from the Jordan; thence also did Christ begin to preach the Gospel after He was baptized. The son of Nave appoints the twelve to divide the inheritance; and Jesus sends forth the twelve Apostles, heralds of truth, into the whole world. He who was the type saved Rahab, the harlot, who had believed; the True Jesus on the other hand says: ‘Behold, the publicans and the harlots are entering the kingdom of God before you’ (Matt 21:31). With but a shout, the walls of Jericho collapsed in the time of the type; and because of these words of Jesus: ‘There will not be left here one stone upon another’ (Matt 24:2), the temple of the Jews just opposite us is fallen.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 at 9:59 am
In a book published in 1959, R. M. Grant attempted “to explain Gnosticism as arising out of the debris of apocalyptic-eschatological hopes which resulted from the fall or falls of Jerusalem.” According to a reviewer in Theology T0day, “Grant stresses the Jewish element which, as he rightly says, has in the past been unduly neglected; but lie is fully aware that this was not, the only element in the very complex phenomenon which we know as Gnosticism. Jonas in his recent book The Gnostic Religion says that nothing as yet has convinced him of ‘the judaistic thesis,’ rightly if this means a theory which sees in Judaism the sole fons et origo; but in regard to the importance of the Jewish contribution Grant surely provides evidence enough and to spare. The second chapter finds confirmation for the theory in the ways in which the Gnostic picture of the heavenly world emerged from speculations characteristic of Jewish apocalyptic, while the third deals with the traditions relating to Simon Magus and with some other systems which show similar attitudes to the Jewish Law. The fourth chapter is concerned with ‘the Syrian Gnosis specifically related to Christian ideas of salvation,’ and the fifth with the major systems of the second century. Here Grant takes issue with the thesis of Bultmann and Jonas, that Gnosticism begins in mythology and ends in philosophy. Finally the closing chapter discusses Gnosticism and early Christianity, and a brief conclusion completes the book.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, December 21, 2007 at 6:33 am
We might not have the Nag Hammadi library if it had not been for a gruesome murder. The collection was found in 1945 by two brothers in Egypt, Muhammed and Kalifah Ali. As Giovanni Filoramo tells it, when the brothers took the jar containing the texts back to their village, they got caught up in a blood feud: “The father, a night watchman of the irrigation system for the neighboring fields, had some months previously surprised a thief during one of his tours of inspection and killed him. The following morning, in accordance with a widely held tradition of vendetta, he too was murdered. About a month after the discover of the library, Ahmad, a molasses dealer who was passing through, fell asleep in the midday heat near the house of Muhammed Ali. A neighbor informed Muhammed Ali that the unfortunate man was his father’s murderer. Muhammed Ali thereupon rushed home to tell his brothers and his mother the good news. The whole family set upon the victim, and literally tore him limb from limb. The climax of the blood feud was to cut up his heart and divide it among themselves.”
The police learned of the murder, and issued a warrant for Muhammed’s arrest. He believed the texts were cursed, and had deposited the texts with a Coptic priest, and from there, through a complicated series of exchanges, they finally ended up in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 20, 2007 at 5:27 am
The gospel comes to the Jews first. When they resist, Paul turns to the Gentiles. But he hopes to provoke the Jews to jealousy by his ministry among the Gentiles, so that in the end Jews would be saved along with Gentiles. The gospel moves from Jew to Gentile and back to Jew.
The NT canon, arguably, does something similar. The gospels describe Jesus’ work in Israel, with the occasional contact with Gentiles. Acts begins in Jerusalem, but ends with Paul turning from the Roman Jews to Gentiles. Turn the page, and Paul is writing to Christians in Rome, a neat epistolary continuation of Acts. His letters are mainly addressed to Christians in Gentile areas, and to what are partly (if not predominantly) Gentile churches. If Hebrews is Pauline, it marks a shift in focus, a canonical replication of Paul’s argument in Romans 9-11. (Hebrews makes a neat numerological conclusion to a Pauline corpus - 14 letters.)
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, June 9, 2007 at 9:56 am
Rosenstock-Huessy notes that the ancient world observed a division of labor with regard to speech: “Women are expected to contribute wild, passionate, inarticulate shouts of blind feeling. Men are expected to build on this natural stratum the structure of high and articulate speech. . . . Women and children yell, weep, shake; men act and speak.”
Against this background, Paul’s instructions for women to be silent have a different impact than is often thought:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, February 10, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Historical Jesus studies, Rosenstock-Huessy claims, attempt to reduce the four gospels to a single unified story, turning the gospels into “material for our reconstruction of the life of Jesus from all the material.” Or, historical Jesus studies attempt to place Jesus among the ancients: “He belonged with antiquity. He was speaking, thinking, praying, teaching like many men of ancient times.” The whole purpose was to find the Jesus “behind” the sources.
This is impossible, since the sources are eyewitnesses or based on eyewitnesses. It’s also impossible because we have been formed by the gospels, and can’t go back beyond them.
But it’s not only impossible. It’s worse than impossible. If Jesus is just another ancient man, “there is no reason to fuss about this man, the little man from the ‘Orient.’”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, February 9, 2007 at 8:37 am
Hebrews says that with a change of priesthood there is also a change of law, and these two are the main features of covenantal shifts. In context, “law” has specific reference to the rules of qualifications for priests.
One might generalize: Fundamental cultural changes are changes in priesthood and changes in law: Priesthood as the elite, the guardians of the sacred, however the sacred is defined; law as the rules for qualification of elites, whether piety, university training, skill in battle, etc.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, August 29, 2006 at 5:28 pm
Kavin Rowe reviews a number of texts in New Testament Theology (NTT) in JBL (125:6), and finds that “recent work in NTT has reached the point of consensus on the importance of the OT for NTT: readings of the NT that downplay or even erase the fundamental historical and theological significance of the OT for the New contradict the NT itself to such a degree that they cease to be NTT.” “Marcionite hermeneutics” is on its way out. Further, “there is widespread agreement that the import of the OT extends far beynd citations and/or allusions; the entirety of the OT must be taken into account.”
It might be better news if NTT yielded altogether to BT, but one is happy for smaller favors.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, August 9, 2006 at 6:18 pm
Augustine’s City of God created the Christian West because it enabled believers to think about a future of Christianity that did not depend on the persistence of Rome. Augustine relativized the story of Rome to the story of the City of God.
How did he do that? Jesus taught him. Jesus taught His disciples to imagine a future of the people of God, the children of Abraham, that did not depend on the persistence of Jerusalem or its temple. Jesus had relativized the story of Israel to the story of the City of God, and Augustine followed suit.
In this sense as in others, AD 70 was an epoch-making event. The Olivet Discourse was the charter of a new world, and spelled the end of the old.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, August 2, 2006 at 9:24 pm
In a couple of books, David deSilva interprets the letter to the Hebrews in terms of Greco-Roman clientage and patronage systems. I have my suspicions about social-science interpretations of the NT, but deSilva’s work is illuminating. In a brief study of honor and shame in Hebrews, he writes that “The bond between client and patron, or, one should add, between friends who share mutual beneficence, is thus truly the strongest bond in Greco-Roman society. Where the sanctity of gratitude is maintained, it becomes the one support which remains after all othe values and valuables have crumbled - truly the cement of society which Seneca and others claimed it to be. Such, the author of Hebrews claims, is the gratitude, the loyalty, which is due the Benefactor and Broker of God’s favor, Jesus. When the author concludes his exhortation in 12:28, he stresses the second sence of CHARIS: ECHOMEN CHARIN, ‘let us show gratitude.’ Saller notes that such amicitia, indeed whether between equals or unequals, ‘was supposed to be founded on virtue (especially fides).’ It is this fides, or PISTIS, to which the author of Hebrews enjoins his readers through both negative and positive models, through warnings and exhortations.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, April 15, 2006 at 5:10 pm
1) Verse 4 moves from the affliction of the apostles (”our”) to the comfort of “those who are in any affliction.” This movement does not depend on any similarity or identity between the affliction of the apostles and the affliction of other sufferers (though cf. v. 6b). Members of the church may be afflicted in ways that the apostles have never experienced, but the apostles are still able to provide comfort through their own experience of comfort in affliction. Here is an apostle who has been flogged and imprisoned; here is a young woman bereaved of a newborn baby; does the apostle’s experience give him authority to speak comfort to her? Paul says Yes: “any” affliction.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, April 6, 2006 at 2:30 pm
Much of the following was inspired by a lecture by Dr. David Powlison of the counseling center at Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia.
INTRODUCTION
As disciples of Jesus, we are all called to take our cross to suffer with Him. He suffered because He provoked murderous hatred from his enemies. Our afflictions are less grand: The car battery dies the same day you’re having a job interview and you have to get the kids to the dentist before school and you shut the car hood on our thumb and get grease on your new power tie and then get stuck in traffic until the cop pulls you over. . . . Is this suffering with Christ? How?
THE TEXT
“Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, to the church of God which is at Corinth, with all the saints who are in all Achaia: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 1:1-14).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, April 5, 2006 at 10:33 am
Bultmann says that we moderns who can flick on electric lights cannot believe in the dichotomous anthropology of the New Testament, which distinguishes absolutely between the spiritual core of the self and the physical body.
Problem is, that’s not the New Testament anthropology. In fact, it’s ironically the product of the modern worldview to which Bultmann wants to adhere. Bultmann has become sooo modern that he can no longer believe in modernity’s man, the ghost in the machine.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, March 4, 2006 at 3:04 pm
Roland Worth provides a valuable treatment of the Sermon on the Mount by discussing the OT background to Jesus’ teaching. His overall argument is that the antitheses of Jesus’ sermon do not offer anything especially new but are “firmly rooted in Old Testament teaching.” Jesus’ “I say” is not a challenge to Moses but to “popular (or clerical distortions of his own day. It was not a case of Jesus versus Moses, but of Jesus versus traditional interpretation, something profoundly different.”
Worth’s discussion of “turning the cheek” is especially helpful. As far as OT background, he points to Job 16:10; Lamentations 3:28-30; and Isaiah 50:6. But the most useful part of the discussion is Worth’s claim that what Jesus has in view is not physical assault but insult. Jesus is not denying a right to self-defense, a right granted by Torah. Thus, “when one takes this text and attempts to make Jesus lay down some ironclad rule of pacifism, one is missing the point entirely. Whether to serve as a soldier is an important ethical decision but not one that this text directly discusses.” Worth makes his case (following Walter Wink) from the details of Jesus’ description. Assuming that someone is right-handed, a punch would strike his opponent on the left cheek rather than the right. Worth thus assumes that Jesus has in view a back-handed slap across the cheek. As Wink puts it, “A backhand slap was the usual way of admonishing inferiors. Masters backhanded slaves; husbands, wives; parents, children; men, women; Romans, Jews. We have here a set of unequal relations, in each of which retaliation would be suicidal.” But the offer of the left cheek is not merely a matter of submitting to an unequal balance of power; offering the left cheek shifts the balance of power. Wink again: “This action robs the oppressor of the power to humiliate. The person who turns the other cheeck is saying in effect, ‘Try again. Your first blow failed to achieve its intended effect. I deny you the power to humiliate me. . . . You cannot demean me.” Jesus doesn’t advocate non-resistance, but a non-violent resistance that shifts the shame from the victim to the perpetrator.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, April 5, 2005 at 11:35 pm
?That Easter day with joy was bright; the sun show out with fairer light, when to their wondering eyes restored, the glad apostles saw their Lord.?E So wrote a Latin poet of the fourth century.
Joy, however, is not the only emotional note in the gospel accounts of Easter. Alongside joy, there is fear, and lots of it. The guards at the tomb ?shook for fear?Ewhen Jesus came from the grave with his ?appearance . . . like lightning, and his garment as white as snow?E(Matthew 27:3-4). The women too, when they heard the announcement, ran to the twelve ?with fear and great joy.?E Mark is more blunt: the women ?went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had gripped them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid?E(Mark 16:8). And Luke tells us that when the women saw the angels at the tomb, they ?were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground?E(Luke 24:5), and when Jesus later appears to the Twelve, ?they were startled and frightened and thought that they had seen a spirit?E(24:37).
That poet was right: Easter is a day of gladness. Before it was a day of gladness, though, it was a day of terror. This shouldn?t surprise us, and it wouldn?t surprise us except that we have domesticated the resurrection. In most contexts, it?s not good news when a corpse comes back to life. It?s uncanny. It is not the stuff of fairy tales and bedtime stories. It?s the stuff of horror movies.
Easter is terrifying especially to Jesus?Eenemies, as it is to all tyrants. The limit of a tyrant?s power is the power to kill. Tyrants torture and harass, but their trump card is to threaten death. What can the tyrant do when that doesn?t work, when the people they kill keep popping back to life or when others keep returning to take their places? Easter is definitely not good news to tyrants, because it demonstrates that they are not in control. If our proclamation of Easter does not make Caesar tremble on his throne, we are not preaching Easter.
For the disciples of Jesus, however, fear is only the penultimate emotion of Easter. For the disciples, perfect joy casts out fear. The final word for believers is not a word of condemnation or a sentence of death, but a promise of life and a declaration of forgiveness. For us, the ultimate word of Easter is not ?they were afraid.?E It is the command of Jesus, ?Fear not; it is I.?E
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, March 27, 2005 at 7:51 am
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