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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
Epiphany is a season about light, about the light that God is, about the Light from Light that God sent, about the light from the Light of Light that shines from the church to draw the nations to the brightness of His rising.
Epiphany is also, inescapably, about darkness. Light came into the world, but men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. The Magi followed a bright star to the Light, but King Herod tried to douse the light with children’s blood.
Epiphany anticipates that the light of the gospel spread to the corners of the earth; Epiphany also commemorates the thousands upon thousands who have died, and continue to die, for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.
But we are not left with a Manichean standoff. Every effort to stamp out the light backfires, because martyrs are the brightest stars in the firmament. This is the message of Epiphany: Light shines into darkness, and, try as it might, the darkness cannot stop it.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, January 8, 2012 at 7:36 am
John 1:14: The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
God doesn’t need the incarnation any more than He needs the world. He would be the same infinitely joyful, infinitely lively and infinitely satisfied God if we had never existed and if Jesus had never been born.
God doesn’t need the incarnation, but the incarnation is not alien to God. God is boundlessly good, with a goodness that is infinite love. He is a ring of self-giving love from Father to Spirit to Son to Spirit to Father. Philanthropy – love for humans – comes naturally to the Triune God, the fitting expression of the goodness God is.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, December 25, 2011 at 8:38 am
It’s often said that the ancients couldn’t conceive of the incarnation because they couldn’t conceive of the infinite inhabiting the finite. The real problem was more fundamental: The ancients couldn’t conceive of anything truly infinite.
An infinite thing has no boundaries; without boundaries, a thing is shapeless; shapeless things cannot be defined as things at all, and so don’t really exist. For the ancients, infinity was an all-consuming blob of terrifying nothing. “Nothing infinite can exist,” Aristotle said.
Christians know God is infinite, and we know it not in spite of the incarnation but because of the incarnation. A finite God would be confined to his divinity. Because the Son is infinite, He can invade flesh; because the Spirit is infinite, He can dwell richly in your heart. Christmas is not a refutation of God’s infinity; it’s the proof.
There is no boundary God cannot cross, no wall that can keep Him out: Not your weaknesses, not your sins, not your hard heart, not your past history, not even your tiny capacity to know and love God. By the Spirit, God can stretch you until you become big enough to receive Him in all His fullness, stretch you to receive the infinite gift of the Son in the manger.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, December 25, 2011 at 8:16 am
Gregory of Nyssa (Against Eunomius 3.3) recognizes that the crux (!) of the debate between Arian and orthodox is the cross: “we say that the God who was manifested through the cross must be honored in the same way as the Father is honored while they consider the Passion as an obstacle to glorifying the only-begotten God equally with the God who begot him. . . . For it is obvious that the reason why he places the Father above the Son and exalts him with superior honor is that the shame of the cross does not pertain to him. And the reason why he insists that the nature of the Son is different and inferior is that the disgrace of the cross is attributed to him alone and does not pertain to the Father. . . . So then who is ashamed of the cross? The one who even after the Passion worships the Son equally with the Father or the one who even before the Passion degrades him, not only by counting him among the creation but by asserting that his nature is passible on the premise that he could not have come to experience his sufferings if he did not possess a nature susceptible to such sufferings?”
Not the Arians but the Orthodox are the true theologians of the cross. Classic theism is no metaphysical speculation, but a defense of the suffering God.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 2:38 pm
During the fourth century, the church had in an intense debate about the nature of the Son who became flesh. Does the Father choose to create a Son, as Arius believed? Or is having a Son essential to the Father’s very existence as God?
These debates seem tedious and irrelevant. Can anyone really know? Does it really matter? It mattered to the church fathers. They believed the entire Christian faith hinged on getting this right. Unless they got this right, they lost the gospel.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, December 18, 2011 at 7:10 am
In Messiaen’s sequence of nine organ pieces on La Nativite du Seigneur, the piece entitled “Jesus accepte le Souffrance” is the seventh, between “Les Anges” and “Les Mages.” It seems to refer to the slaughter of innocents in Bethlehem, but Messiaen has apparently turned it into a moment of vicarious suffering for Jesus Himself. Though He escapes, He begins already as an infant to bear our sorrows.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 11:16 am
Anatolios argues that one of the differences between theologians of the unity of will like Arius (Father begets Son by will) and theologians of the unity of being like Alexander and Athanasius (Son is of the Father’s very being) is the location of mystery. Arius located the apophatic limit in the Unbegotten “Father” himself. Alexander, by contrast, said that Son was equally incomprehensible with the Father.
But more intriguingly, the mystery is not located in the Father and Son separately, but in the ineffable reality of their relationship, of the eternal begetting and being begotten. This relation is simultaneously, however, the point of access for knowledge of the Father, since then Father is known in the Son: “Knowledge of God is thus in the first place a transaction between the Father and the Son, and the mystery of God is identified with that relationship itself rather than exclusively with the Unbegotten. Positive access to the knowledge of God is coincidental with access to the mutuality of that relation, which in turn is predicated upon a correct confession of the true nature of that mutuality.”
One of the implications of this relocation is that the mystery of God is less to do with “metaphysics” and instead is located in the relationships of the Persons. What is incomprehensible about God is not merely or mainly His transcendence but His love: The mystery of God is the mystery of the world, which is the mystery of love. Mix in Heidegger’s “Why is there something?” question, add a dollop of Augustinian pneumatology, and we’re on to something.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 11:03 am
Anatolios (Retrieving Nicaea
“Eusebius’s account of the relation between Father and Son extends seamlessly into a comprehensive vision of reality in which the chain of being coincides at every level with a chain of willing, of command and obedience. The metaphysical, cosmic, and worldly spheres can all be encompassed by the conception of good government. Good government begins with the sovereign willing of the Unbegotten, which manifests the goodness of his nature. The primordial act of this wiling occurs when the father brings forth the Son and ‘cast[s] in him the seeds of the constitution and government of the universe.’ As the Son is vice-regent of the Unbegotten Father, so it the emperor the vice-regent of the Word. Reality is pervasively a monarchy, ordered by a chain of benevolent command a freely embraced obedience. The rupture of this order by sin has been repaired by the incarnate Word, and the emperor presides over the continuance of this redeemed order. Earthly government now once again images the orderly hierarchical stream of divine generation.” He cites Eusebius’s oration in praise of Constantine, chapter 3, in support.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 9:45 am
My musings on the political import of Advent at the First Things site this morning: http://www.firstthings.com/
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, December 16, 2011 at 4:59 am
Aroma and memory are linked liturgically and spiritually as well as literally. The sacrifices were offered as “memorials” before Yahweh, as was incense. He was called to remember and act. The fragrance of the lover arouses the bride to remember him, and the reputation and name of our Lover, which is His fragrance, call us to remember Him. When the name of Jesus is pronounced, what effect does it have? When His life and death and deed are recounted, how do we react? When He is slandered and mocked, what do we do in response? Do we act like lovers whose memory and love is aroused by the Name of our Lover?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 11:44 am
It’s often noted, but during this Advent the point struck home with particular force: John begins his gospel with the incarnational gospel that the “Word became flesh and tabernacled (skenoo) among us.” God the Word descends from heaven to pitch His tent with men.
But that incarnational descent is not, in a sense, completed unti the revelation of the bride. The same verb (skenoo) appears again in Revelation 21:3: “Behold the tent of God with men, and he will tabernacle with them.” But this describes not the descent of the Son but of the Bride (v. 1).
God’s residence with humanity doesn’t reach its end until the Spirit-filled Bride descends from heaven. The church is not so much a “continuing incarnation” as a “completion of the incarnation.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 5:43 am
Today’s sermon is about hope. Hope is not certainty. Hope doesn’t guarantee complete control. A hopeful person is not someone who has anticipated and managed all the contingencies before he begins. Hope doesn’t avoid all mistakes and miscues.
Hope is a virtue of adventurers: From hope, and through hope, and to hope are all adventures. Adventurers don’t know where their quests will take them. For adventurers, mistakes are part of the job description. Columbus never discovered what he set out to find, but his “error” discovered, and created, a new world.
Adventure is a fitting theme for Advent. Advent means “coming” or “arrival,” but to arrive somewhere, you first have to leave somewhere else. Advent reveals the God who arrives because it reveals the God who leaves home for a far country. Advent is the human adventure of the Triune God.
Christian hope comes from being caught up in the adventure of the God of hope, the Father who places all His bets on the Son and the Son who hopes in His Spirit. In hope, we know our final destination, even if the trail twists in unexpected ways. Swept along by the Spirit of God’s adventure, our errors merely open fresh byways for exploration and God turns even our sins into moments in the adventure.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, December 4, 2011 at 6:49 am
I have an Advent meditation at http://www.firstthings.com/ this morning.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, December 2, 2011 at 6:37 am
Anatiolios offers this explanation of Athanasius’ defense of homoousios: “the meaning of the Nicene homoousios is contained in its function as a guide to a certain way of reading Scripture. An immediate hermeneutical consequence of this principle is that efforts to understand this term primarily by recourse to secular usages of ousia and cognate terms are misguided. Neither the council fathers of Nicea nor Athanasius himself were working with any determinate technical sense of ousia or homoousios. Moreover, they were not attempting to signify the divine essence by directly invoking an objective reference, whether the being of God or some creaturely analogue. The meaning of homoousios thus resides not in its inherent capacity to invoke an objective referent of its own, but rather in its assigned function of regulating how scriptural language as a whole refers to God and Christ.” The word does “successfully refer to God,” but it does so because it “regulates the reference of the whole nexus of scriptural paradeigmata in the direction of the radical ontological correlativity of Father and Son.”
Anatiolios is exactly right about Athanasius, and comments, as he recognizes, raise some important methodological questions: “Do the scriptural patterns of naming Christ and the scriptural way of telling the story of Christ equally permit two rival interpretations, so that endorsing one and rejecting the other amounts to a heteronomous determination of the meaning of Scripture?” Is Scripture ambiguous, a wax nose, that actually does leave open the question of the Son’s ontological status? Athanasius answers No: “He argues that the Nicene homoousios provides the only correct interpretation of scriptural language . . . . The regulation of scriptural language provided by the homoousios arises from within scriptural language and narrative considered as a whole – not from without.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 2:42 pm
By insisting that “Creator” is a name intrinsic to God’s essence, Athanasius steps back into the problems from which Arianism arose in the first place. Anatolios notes that the debates about “Origen’s speculation that the title ‘Almighty,’ as a designation of God’s eternal being, implies that there was always a world over which God was ‘Almighty’” led to a reaction that emphasized “the absolute priority of the Unbegotten God over against a world that had a punctiliar origin ‘from nothing.’”
Athanasius avoids Origen’s error “by implicitly drawing a distinction between the active potency of God’s creative act, which is coterminus with the Father-Son relation, and the term of that act. In order for the title ‘Creator’ to be authentically predicated of the divine being, it is not necessary for the term of God’s creative potency to be in existence but only for that active potency itself to be integral to the divine being.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 2:31 pm
Advent seems to be about the shame of God, but this is nothing new. Long before the incarnation, God risked shame. He chose elderly Abraham and his barren wife – strangers and aliens, without country, without city, without seed – as the unlikely parents of His people. Yahweh became their God. Long before Jesus, God began to enter into flesh.
Whenever we commit to people and causes and projects, we place ourselves at the mercy of others. We put our reputations and names on the line. Will our chosen spouse be faithful? Will our children embarrass us? Will the others working on this project pull their weight? Will we risk everything, and lose? Will we be ashamed?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, November 27, 2011 at 6:57 am
My friend and former student Stephen Long sends along this quotation from Augustine and brief analysis that follows. The excerpt is from Augustine’s Sermon 187, a Christmas sermon. The portion in quotation marks is from Augustine, the paragraph at the end from Stephen.
“When he took human limbs to himself, after all, he did not abandon his divine works; nor did he stop reaching mightily from end to end, and disposing all things sweetly. When he clothed himself with the weakness of the flesh, he was received, not locked up, in the virgin’s womb; thus the food of wisdom was not withdrawn from the angels, while ate the same time we were enabled to taste and see how sweet is the Lord.
“Why should all this surprise us about the Word of God, seeing that this sermon I am addressing to you flows so freely into your senses, that you hearers both receive it, and don’t imprison or corner it? I mean, if you didn’t receive it, you wouldn’t learn anything; if you cornered it, it wouldn’t reach anyone else. And of course this sermon is divided up into words and syllables; and yet for all that, you don’t each take portions and pieces of it, as you would of food for the stomach; but you all hear it all, each of you hears it all. … Nor does this happen at successive times, in such a way that the sermon being delivered first comes into you, then has to go out from you if it is to enter someone else; but it comes simultaneously to all of you, and the whole of it to each of you. And if the whole of it could be retained in memory, just as all of you have come to hear the whole of it, so you could each go away with the whole of it.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 9:34 am
In place of the arborescent systems of modernity, Deleuze and Guattari rhizomic models. Herman Rapaport explains (The Literary Theory Toolkit: A Compendium of Concepts and Methods
By contrast, the rhizome refers to “acentered systems, finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbor to any other, [and in which] the stems of channels do not preexist, and all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment – such that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central agency.” More fully,
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 6:19 am
We do not see Jesus. How do we know He is present?
Smell and hearing are the senses of presence-in-absence, the senses that enable us to know the presence of what we do not see.
Protestants know all about hearing Jesus. The fragrance of Christ is an undeveloped area of Christology.
Smell is a presence in absence. I smell the roast in the oven, and know dinner is close. A woman’s perfume precedes her and lingers after her, whether I see her or not. I smell something decaying in the wall, but I have to pull away the wall board to see it. I can smell my daughter’s shampoo when she tries to sneak up behind me.
Christ has poured the oil of the Spirit upon us, anointing us with the fragrant oil of priesthood. In Christ, we are living sacrifices, spreading the aroma of Christ, a savor of life and death. Because we are enveloped with the aroma of the Spirit, we are a sweet savor to the Father. We are quickened not only by hearing the Name of Jesus, but by its aroma, since His “name is like oil poured out.”
And so on.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, September 30, 2011 at 1:42 pm
Wow. Robert Jenson knows how to write a review. In the latest Pro Ecclesia, he presents his “three complaints” against Nathan Kerr’s Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Theopolitical Visions)
Kerr’s book takes aim at historicism, not only because it cannot account for itself (any teleology that gives meaning to history as a whole “has to be imported . . . from some ahistorical grasp of truth or purpose,” as Jenson puts it) but also because it robs Christ’s advent of its “sheer eruptive contingency” that “without mediation crosses the run of events and reconfigures history just thereby” (Jenson’s summary again).
Kerr tests Barth, Hauerwas, and Yoder, and finds all insufficiently apocalyptic. Jenson again: “To satisfy Kerr, the ‘singular’ event of the life of Jesus must be able to reconfigure history independently also of any fixed set of churchly practices.” It’s not enough to make the story of Jesus and the church the master story, as Hauerwas does; Jesus destabilizes and interrupted all fixity even in the church’s history. Kerr’s church “exists only as ‘mission,’ that is, as sheer encounter between the powers that now rule ‘real history’ and Christians’ destabilizing ‘doxology’ of Christ’s ever-intrusive advent.”
Which brings up Jenson’s other two complaints.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, September 10, 2011 at 1:17 pm
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