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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
I’m not convinced Gregory’s argument from opposites (Against Eunimius 9.4) is sound, but it’s intriguing and engaging.
Here’s the argument: Certain realities have direct opposites that cannot coexist. Light cannot coexist with darkness, but expels and destroys it. On the other hand, darkness can expel light. So also with the oppositions of good/bad, falsehood/truth. No middle terms exist here, but simple polarities. So, in the creation account, before God calls light into being, there is only darkness. Now, the Son is Light; and if the Son once was not, then what was could not be some neutral neither-light-nor-darkness, nor some middle light-darkness. Before the Father generated the Son, there must have been darkness.
It “necessarily” follows that prior to the begetting of the Son, Eunomius’s god was enveloped in darkness: “surrounded by darkness instead of Light, by falsehood instead of truth, by death instead of life, by evil instead of good.” If “ungenerate light” is one thing, and “generate light” is another, then it follows that “it is impossible that the light [that is, the generated light] should shine forth save out of darkness.” Between the ungenerate and ungenerating light of the Father and the generated light of the Son is an “interval of darkness,” a cloud of unbeing from which or through which the Ungenerate Father has to cut in order to generate a Son.
One of the many interesting implications of this is that Arianism falls back into the ontology of violence characteristic of combat myths. To begin to be productive, the ungenerate must contend with his opposite. To generate or shine the light that Eunomius claims he is, he must first overcome darkness. The god of Eunomius may be able to forge some kind of demiurge; he is incapable of creating in the way that Genesis says Yahweh creates.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 3:31 pm
Gregory charges Eunomius (10.2) with believing he can climb past the word to a direct encounter with the Ungenerate Father. As Gregory sees it, Eunomius is saying that “the human mind, scrutinizing the knowledge of real existence, and lifting itself above the sensible and intelligible creation, will leave God the Word, Who was in the beginning, below itself, just as it has left below it all other things, and itself comes to be in Him in Whom God the Word was not, treading, by mental activity, regions which lie beyond the life of the Son, there searching for eternal life, where the Only-Begotten God is not.”
Powerful stuff. In response, Gregory points to the Johannine claim that the Word is eternal life, and that life is in Him. Why then seek eternal life by leaping over the word. To that we may add: As Gregory shows, Arianism dissolved into mysticism, as the Arian climbs past the eternal Expression of the Father to gain access to the now-wordless Father. Arianism is also a kind of gnosticism, not only because it’s claiming an extra-human degree of knowledge but also because it is leaving time and matter behind. In leaping over the Son to get to the Father, Arians inevitably also leap over redemptive history, where the Word is made flesh.
Gregory’s got it right: We need nor should we want anything beyond the Word, beyond the incarnate Word in whom we have seen the indwelling Father, beyond the words that the Word speaks and inspires to be write, beyond the visible words by which He comes near to us. There are no side or back doors to the Father, for Jesus and Jesus alone is the door.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 3:17 pm
In 2006, Pope Benedict came under intense criticism for citing the harsh words of a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor about Islam. The Pope’s point was to highlight the importance of Greek philosophy in the Christian tradition. He cited the following passage from the emperor’s dialog with a Persian Muslim: “‘God,’ he says, ‘is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably (sun logo) is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats. . . To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death.’”
He observed: “The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry.” He asked, “Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God.” He elaborated by citing John 1.
I don’t think there is “profound harmony” here.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, August 23, 2010 at 4:07 am
In his The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford Early Christian Studies)
From evidence such as this, Gavrilyuk concludes that “the anti-anthropomorphic impulse was not solely an external Hellenistic influence, but also an internal development within pre-Christian Judaism.” He notes that the church followed suit in its “concern to interpret the anthropopathic passages in a God-befitting manner,” and says that the church never lapsed into the “naive anthropomorphism and anthropopathism in rabbinic thought.”
I make no comment about Gavrilyuk’s larger argument, but this line of defense simply doesn’t work.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 4:10 pm
God is Lord of light. Everyone says that.
But that’s not much help to me, since I’m lost in the dark. If God is going to be my Lord, He has to be Lord of light and dark, death and life. It’s not enough for Him to have first place in creation. He has to be the firstborn of the dead, so that in all things He might be preeminent.
Hence the incarnation: The Son took flesh to become Lord of death, Lord of the dark.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 3:37 pm
Barth famously describes the incarnation as the Son’s journey into a far country, borrowing a phrase from the story of the Prodigal Son. Is Jesus the Prodigal?
The parable of Luke 15 doesn’t completely work as an allegory of Jesus; it’s an allegory of Israel in the first instance. But Jesus is Israel and His journey is the journey of His people. He goes to a far country; He spends time with harlots; He feeds swine; He was dead and lives again; His Father invests Him with a robe and a ring, kisses and rejoices over His return, calls out the singers to celebrate.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 6:36 am
Traditionally, “Arian” was believed to apply to a homogenous and well-organized heretical movement that arose in the fourth century, which took its theological cues from Arius.
Recent scholars doubt most of that. Arius was a conservative, not a deviant. Arius was a lesser figure than he has been made out; Athanasius made him central and, influenced by Marcellus and others during his Roman exile, labeled everyone he opposed “Arian.” Those labeled “Arians” different among themselves. Rowan Williams and Maurice Wiles describe the opponents of Athanasius as a “loose” and “uneasy” alliance; Williams thinks (or thought at the time of his book on Arius) that they were united only in their opposition to Nicea and its homoousios.
Others have suggested that “Arianism” as historically understood is a construct of Athanasian rhetoric. David Gwynn (The Eusebians: The Polemic of Athanasius of Alexandria and the Construction of the `Arian Controversy’ (Oxford Theological Monographs)
Even granting these challenges to the standard account, neither the historical nor the theological questions are thereby settled:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, June 18, 2010 at 8:46 am
Like many other fathers, Athanasius described heretics as Jews – in his case, the Arians. He had, as I read Athanasius, biblical and theological reasons for saying so.
When Newman repeats the link between Judaism and Arianism in his book on the Arians, the emphasis is racial. Jews are a “carnal, self-indulgent religion” that gives “license to the grosser tastes of human nature.” In Antioch, where Jews were powerful and where Arianism originated (so Newman argues), Judaism could not help but deflect minds from the higher realities of the church: ”it necessarily indisposed the mind for the severeand unexciting mysteries, the large indefinite promises, and the remotesanctions, of Catholic faith; which fell as cold and uninviting on the depraved imagination, as the doctrines of the Divine Unity and of implicit trust in the unseen God, on the minds of the early Israelites.”
As Virginia Burrus has noted, Newman analyzed Jewish-Christian relations in Alexandria in a way that absolved Athanasius’ hometown of the taint of Arianism, despite the large Jewish population there: ”Although the city was ‘a celebrated seat of both Jewish and Greek philosophy,’ its ‘Christian School’ remained untainted by either Judaism or the rationalism of the ‘Eclectic sect’; the latter a philosophic heresy, as Newman frames it, deviating from the ’comprehensive philosophy’ of the earlier, more salutary Platonism that nourished the Church. For the ‘Proselytizing Church’ of Alexandria (whatever its stratagems of tactful insinuation), influence apparently went only one way when it came to Jews and Eclectic philosophers: these ‘others’ were either converted or excluded. Indeed, Newman seems happy to imagine Alexandria as a city without Jews—however implausibly or inconsistently. It was the Antiochene Church—in explicit contrast to the Alexandrian—that ‘was exposed to the influence of Judaism’ and which ultimately produced the heresy of Arianism.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, June 9, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Michael Fox writes that “The equality of the lovers and the equality of their love, rather than the Song’s earthly sensuality, are what makes their union an inappropriate analogy for the bond between God and Israel.”
That would be persuasive, but for the massive reality of the incarnation. In the mutuality of the Song, we have one of hundreds of hints in the Old Testament that God’s love and promises to Israel could only be fulfilled by Yahweh-in-flesh. The Song depicts the yearning of Israel for just such an equal relation, a yearning fulfilled when the Son takes flesh like the bride to become one with the bride.
The Song gives an erotic answer to Anselm’s question, Cur Deus Homo?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 8:51 am
As Zizek explains Hegel’s answer to the Anselmian question, it is a political question: “why cannot we conceive a direct passage from In-itself to For-itself, from God as full Substance existing in itself, beyond human history, to the Holy Spirit as spiritual-virtual substance, as the substance that exists only insofar it is ‘kept alive’ by the incessant activity of the individuals? Why not such a direct ‘desalienation,’ by means of which individuals recognize the God qua transcendent substance the ‘reified’ result of their own activity?”
Why can’t the Lord simply send out His reconciling Spirit and bind everyone in sweetness and love? Why the “deviation” through the cross? Why is that socially necessary?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, January 22, 2010 at 9:09 am
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, John says. We often think that the Word is concealed behind His flesh. But that is the opposite of the truth. In the Old Testament, Yahweh was hidden within the temple veils, but in the incarnation He comes out of hiding.
This is what John says in the next sentence: The Word became flesh, and we saw His glory, the glory of the only-begotten of the Father. The flesh of Jesus isn’t a protective shield between us and God. Rather, through the flesh, God Himself comes near to touch His creation, to touch us.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, January 3, 2010 at 6:49 am
Christ is the “living will” of the Father, says Athanasius. Rowan Williams glosses this with: “since Scripture makes clear that the Word is the understanding and purpose of the Father, then to claim that the Son exists by an act of will is absurd: he is the Father’s conscious, purposive act. Deny this, and you end up with the gnostic picture of an indeterminate divine void, which might turn out to be anything, at the source of being; unless you say that the Father’s expressed though or will exists in virtue of an innate thought and will that must be in some way different from it . . . which negates the essential scriptural idea of the Son as simply and directly the reasoning act of the Father.”
Have Reformed treatments of God’s will absorbed this point sufficiently?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 29, 2009 at 2:46 pm
God does not have accidents, says Augustine, and virtually every other theologian since. It’s the corollary of God’s simplicity: He always is what He is, nothing added or taken away. God cannot lost any attribute without losing His being as God.
But then along comes the incarnation. God the Son takes a body. What shall we call that? It is not of God’s essence, since He did not always have a body and since He essentially has no body. The Son’s body certainly seems to meet the definition of an accident. As S. Marc Cohen succinctly puts it, “for a non-substance F to inhere in a substance x is for F to belong accidentally to x.” That’s what the body (x) does in the Son (F).
And the body of the Son also fulfills other criteria of accidents. Cohen again, explaining the asymmetry in the mutual dependence of substance and accident (whose mutuality Aristotle never explores):
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, December 28, 2009 at 12:48 pm
This night is different, O Lord, from all nights. On this night, You opened the womb of the virgin Mary, so that she brought forth the seed of the woman, the new Isaac, the firstborn of Israel, David’s Son, Immanuel. On this night, Your Word, the eternal Light that lightens every man, began to shine from within our flesh.
Therefore, let the sea roar and all it contains, the world and those who dwell in it. Let the rivers clap their hands. Let the mountains sing together for joy before the LORD.
For You have come to judge the earth; You judge the world with righteousness, and You will judge the peoples with equity.
Amen.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 24, 2009 at 7:01 pm
In the early twentieth century, the virgin birth became a litmus test of orthodoxy. Fundamentalists affirmed the virgin birth; modernists denied it. The debate was about miracles: Fundamentalists believe that God can alter the normal pattern of creation and make things work differently.
We at Trinity are fundamentalists, but the virgin birth is not just about the reality of miracles. After all, God had given miracle children many times before, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to Manoah and Elkanah. The virgin birth is different, and that difference is the heart of the gospel.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, December 20, 2009 at 7:05 am
A. N. S. Lane summarizes some themes of Barth’s treatment of the virgin birth: “Barth saw in the virgin birth the expression of a wider truth that is fundamental to his theology. It shows that ‘human nature possesses no capacity for becoming the human nature of Jesus Christ, the place of divine revelation’. While it does become his nature, this is not because of any attributes that it already possesses but rather because of what it suffers and receives at the hand of God. The virgin birth, therefore, is a further denial of man’s natural capacity for God, a favourite theme with Barth. It contains a judgement upon man, rot because he is a creature but because he is a disobedient creature.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, December 19, 2009 at 6:24 am
INTRODUCTION
“Rejoice in the Lord always,” Paul says (Philippians 4:4). How? Scripture teaches that the Lord’s presence is our joy. We rejoice because the Lord has come, and is coming.
THE TEXTS
“I will leave in your midst a meek and humble people, and they shall trust in the name of the Lord. . . .” (Zephaniah 3:12-20); “Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, rejoice!” (Philippians 4:4-20); “And when John had heard in prison about the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples and said to Him, ‘Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?’ . . .” (Matthew 11:2-19).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, December 7, 2009 at 5:52 am
In one of his posthumously published series of lectures (Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ
Until the incarnation, “God’s mighty saving intervention” when He reveals His righteousness: “then at last God steps out from behind the law, from behind the veil which Moses wore on his face, from behind the veil of the holy of holies, for God unveils himself immediately. He comes to man and apart from law reveals his righteousness to humanity directly in Jesus Christ, cutting through all distance and abstraction, all law and religion, and sets men and women before him face to face.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 9:53 am
Did Christ have a human soul? Athanasius asks in his two treatises against Apollinaris. He answers Yes, of course, but the way he answers is intriguing. One argument focuses on the death of Jesus: The body of Jesus died, as everyone acknowledges; but death is separation of the body from some life-principle. Jesus must have had a human soul, or he could not have undergone the sundering of soul and body in death.
Ahh, says Apollinaris: But the body was separated from the Word in Jesus’ death. That doesn’t work, Athanasius argues, because it means that the Word does not really go through death. If death is the separation of soul and body, then the Word must pass through that as much as He passes through any other human experience. Passing through the separation means that the Word must remain with both soul and body even in their separation. The Word takes on the whole of human existence, and that means when the human nature He has made His own gets ripped in two, He can’t stand back and watch; He needs to pass through that rupture of His own humanity. Only by suffering the whole of human death in His humanity can the Word overcome death.
The upshot is that, according to Athanasius, if the Word withdrew from the body in its death, He would not have been able to redeem humanity from death. He must cling to His assumed humanity, cling to soul and body when they go their “separate ways,” cling to soul and body through death so that He can reunite them in an eternal life, so that this mortal can put on immortality.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 1:28 pm
INTRODUCTION
During Advent, Pastor Sumpter and I will be alternating preaching, and we will be preaching on the lectionary, that is, the passages that make up our Scripture readings for Advent. All these passages are about the Lord’s “coming,” and thus all shed light on the meaning of the incarnation, the Lord’s coming in the flesh.
THE TEXTS
“Behold, the day of the LORD is coming, and your spoil will be divided in your midst. . . .” (Zechariah 14:1-11). “Therefore, when we could no longer endure it, we thought it good to be left in Athens alone. . . .” (1 Thessalonians 3:1-13). “Then He said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. . . .” (Luke 231:10-34).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 6:23 am
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