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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
Paul’s pneumatology in summary:
The Lord who has become life-giving Spirit fills him.
The Lord, the Spirit transforms him from glory to glory as he gazes at the glory of God in the face of Jesus.
Since the glory of Jesus is the glory of the cross, Paul’s translation into glory means sharing, even “filling up” (Colossians 1:24), the sufferings of Jesus.
Cruciformed by the Spirit, he is afflicted for the “salvation” of the churches (2 Corinthians 1:6).
And this fulfills the hope of Israel, that the Spirit would be poured out to turn the wasteland into Eden (Ezekiel 36).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, April 3, 2012 at 5:43 am
In the highly sensible opening chapter to his Creator Spirit: The Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human
He resolves what he calls the “paradox” of the Spirit’s ineffability and communicability, and the parallel “paradox” in art, in several ways. He cites Calvin Seerveld’s observation that art communicates by “allusivity,” its ability to hint at or refer indirectly so as to enable one to participate in the reality hinted at or referred. In this sense, the ineffability of art, and of the Spirit, is the mode of its communication. It’s precisely the allusiveness and elusiveness of art that enables it to communicate in a participatory manner.
Guthrie summaries this way:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, February 10, 2012 at 2:04 pm
In his epistle to Serapion, Athanasius gives his most extensive consideration to pneumatology. As in his debates with Arians, Athanasius consistently focuses attention back to the pattern of biblical language, what Anatolios calls the “intertextual scriptural characterizations of Father, Son and Spirit.”
For instance: We are made “sons” when we receive the Spirit, and therefore the Spirit is the “one who actualizes our adoption into Christ.” The Father is light, and the Son is the radiance of His glory; the Spirit “is the one in whom we are enlightened.” The Father is fountain, the Son is the outpouring, and we drink the Spirit. The Father is wise, the Son His Wisdom, the Spirit makes us wise.
As Anatolios notes, “the Spirit [is] the one in whom the outward manifestation and activity of the Father and Son is actualized in relation to us. In each case, the Spirit is thus characterized as the point of contact between God and creation.” The Father is “source,” the Son “outgoing manifestation and imaged content of the source,” and the Spirit “the outward actualization of that content in and toward creation.” One of the key points is that “the actualization is precisely actualization of the content that is in Christ” and nothing else. In creation and in redemption the Spirit has “nothing else” to do than to actualize the Word who is the manifestation and speech of the Father.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 3:02 pm
Athanasius believes that human beings are inherently unstable, just because they are creatures. For Athanasius, the stability of salvation rests, Anatolios argues, in the inner-Trinitarian life of giving and receiving. Explaining the “anointing” of Psalm 45 as an anointing of the Son by the Spirit, Athanasius argues as follows (the wording is from Anatolios):
“Salvation is definitively secured when there is a perfect communication between the divine giving of the Spirit and the human receiving of the Spirit, as happens in Christ. In him, the giving is perfect because he is God, who is by nature the giver of the Spirit; the receiving is perfect because he is God in human form; and the perfect union of giving and receiving is established in that the same one is perfect giver and perfect receiver. . . . for Athanasius [Psalm 45] signifies the christological dialectic whereby the immutability of the Word underwrites humanity’s perfect reception of the Spirit through its participation in Christ’s human reception of the Spirit.”
We are secure, stable in fellowship, because we are corporated to the Son who assumed humanity and perfectly received the Spirit. His reception is the surety of ours.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 2:49 pm
In his Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God
This is a problem, as Jenson’s typically deft summary of Hegel’s “Lord and Master” shows: “If you and are to to be free for one another, each of us must be both subject and object in our converse. If I am present in our converse as myself, I am a subject who have you as my object. But if I am not also an object for you as subject, if I in some way or degree evade reciprocal availability to you as one whom you in turn can locate and deal with, I enslave you, no matter with what otherwise good disposition I intend you.”
Jenson wants to know how we escape this dilemma, how the I-Thou doesn’t collapse into an interpersonal form of Foucault’s panopticon, me elusive in my tower watching you as the object of my gaze. He doesn’t think that we can escape this on purely I-Thou grounds: “Most postmodern thought, carrying out Hegel’s insight under the tutelage of horror, has given up such questions except as rhetorical, and supposes that in fact all personal converse is openly or hiddenly a struggle for domination” – open struggle often seen as superior because more honest. Secular postmodernism thus has an uncanny similarity to pneumatically-deprived Trinitarianism.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 19, 2011 at 7:16 am
Ephrem the Syrian on Genesis 1: “The Holy Spirit warmed the waters with a kind of vital warmth, even bringing them to a boil through intense head in order to make them fertile. The action of a hen is similar. It sits on its eggs, making them fertile through the warmth of incubation. Here then, the Holy Spirit foreshadows the sacrament of holy baptism, prefiguring its arrival, so that the waters made fertile by the hovering of the same divine Spirit gave birth to the children of God.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 1:43 pm
The Spirit is a dove. So is the Bride in the Song, since she is her Lover’s inspiration and since she is formed by the Dove into the image of the Dove, so that the Bride and the Dove can moan with one voice of longing for the Lover’s return.
Jonah’s name means “dove,” and he flutters over Nineveh like Noah’s dove over the waters of the new world.
The Spirit is also the glory-eagle that carries (Exodus 19:4) hovers over Israel (Deuteronomy 32:11) as they come out of Egypt. Eagles fly high and nest in the heights; they are swift, energetic, and fierce. Eagle enemies swoop onto Israel (Deuteronomy 28:49), snipping off a branch from the tree to replant far away (Ezekiel 17). The Spirit must be an eagle to wrench Israel away from Pharaoh.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, September 10, 2011 at 6:12 am
Ephesians 5:18-21: Do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord; always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father; and be subject to one another in thefear of Christ.
Let us Pray.
Open, O Lord, our ears and hearts, that we may believe what You promise and do what You command. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
“Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth. . . Be exhilarated always with her love.” So says King Solomon in the staid and prudent book of Proverbs. In a racier mood, he opens the Song of Songs with this: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine.”
Love is intoxicating. Scripture says that the Spirit too is intoxicating.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, August 15, 2011 at 5:16 am
“Do not cast me from your presence, and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me,” David prayed after Nathan exposed his sin with Bathsheba.
David understood what was at stake. He had watched Saul’s terrifying decline – Saul, who received the Spirit, became a new man, joined the prophets, but resisted and grieved the Spirit until the Spirit left him. In place of the Spirit, the Lord sent an evil spirit to torment Saul, and it drove Saul mad.
David did not want to be another Saul: “Do not cast me from your presence; and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, June 12, 2011 at 5:05 am
A Pentecost meditation of mine is published this morning on the First Things web site:
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/06/epiphany-to-pentecost
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, June 10, 2011 at 6:21 am
Challenged to explain what he means by the notion that the Father “breaths” the Spirit, Jenson writes: “in the Old Testament ruach often appears as the breath of life, and when it is the breath of God’s life it is a creating wind that blows creatures around like leaves in a hurricane. Thus when in the Book of Judges Israel’s history gets stuck, the Spirit falls upon some poor unfortunate and makes him or her the instrument of rescue; that is, God blows Israel into motion again. So far an economic specification of the Father’s breathing of the Spirit.”
And immanently? ”God the Father is monarch or source not of a static divine being but of a divine life. God agitates God into being God; he breathes life into Godhead. And that agitation, that breath of life, is so perfectly the Father’s own agitation, that like the Son it is the same God as the Father.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, June 1, 2011 at 4:40 pm
Canlis notes two revolutionary innovations in Calvin’s doctrine of the Spirit: “First, he has shifted the primary bond between the human Jesus and the Father from divine substance to the divine person of the Spirit.” That enables Calvin to rescue Chalcedon from confusion: “rather than two naked natures coexisting without mingling, Calvin treats the whole person of Christ who, by the Spirit, is kept truly human and truly divine. The Holy Spirit represents a new way of being in relationship – the joining of two unlikes in a relationship of particularity and yet union.”
Second, Calvin is enabled to shift the bond between God and humanity from a more Platonic view (based on an ontological similarity between divine and human) to the person of the Holy Spirit. Once again, an abstract ‘similarity’ or ‘point of contact’ is subverted for a person, anchoring human participation only in God himself, beginning with the self-gift of God to us in the person of the Spirit.” Canlis notes elsewhere that for Calvin natural theology is part of his pneumatology.
All this suggests a broader point: When the Spirit is set aside, all sorts of other principles and constructs take His place. What binds the Son and Father is not the Spirit, but a fourth something, the essence, in the Trinity. What binds God and creation is not the Spirit, but some analogia entis or, worse, a continuum of being. What binds the Eucharistic community to its head is not the Spirit, but a substantial transformation of bread and wine. Without the Spirit, natural theologies and natural law intervene.
When the Spirit is set aside or marginalized, theology gets ontologized, depersonalized, alienated from its Trinitarian substance. What we need is a pneumatological ontology.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, April 29, 2011 at 5:05 am
History of the 20th century:
God is dead – Nietzsche.
No, God is silent – Buber.
Then Pentecostalism.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 2:43 pm
Bavinck again on the Spirit’s role in creation: “At the beginning that Spirit moved upon the face of the waters (Gen. 1:2), and He remains active in all that was created.”
He expands the point this way: “By that Spirit God garnishes the heavens (Job 26:13), renews the face of the earth (Ps. 104:30), gives life to man (Job 33:4), maintains the breath in man’s nostrils (Job 27:3), gives him understanding and wisdom (Job 32:8), and also causes the grass to wither and the flower to fade (Isa. 40:7). . . . He by His Spirit gives out all kinds of energies and gifts to His people. In the Old Testament the Spirit of the Lord is the source of all life, all weal, and all ability. He grants courage and strength to the judges, to Othniel (Judges 3:10), Gideon (Judges 6:34), Jephthah (Judges 11:29), and to Samson (Judges 14:6 and 15:14). He grants artistic perception to the makers of the priests’ garments, the tabernacle, and the temple, and He gives wisdom and understanding to the judges who bear the burden of the people alongside of Moses (Num. 11:17, 25). He gives the spirit of prophecy to the prophets, and renewal and sanctification and guidance to all of God’s children (Ps. 51:12-13 and 143:10).”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 3:52 am
This is the first Sunday after Epiphany, when we commemorate the appearance of God in His Son. It is a strange appearance. The Son appears in the flesh, lives, dies, rises, and then quickly disappears. Light flickers in darkness, but then the light goes out, goes elsewhere, and when then? Does darkness descend?
Last week, Pastor Sumpter preached from 1 John, where John makes this astounding claim: “as He is, so also are we in this world” (4:17). That is the key to understanding epiphany. Jesus came and left, yet He did not leave. He sent His Spirit, and His Spirit is with us. By filling us with the oil of the Spirit, He lit us as lights in the world, lamps on a lampstand. We are the continuing epiphany of God.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, January 9, 2011 at 7:00 am
God doesn’t send dreams, Aristotle argued. How did he know? If God were sending dreams, He would send them to a better sort of folk: “it is absurd to hold that it is God who sends such dreams, and yet that He sends them not to the best and wisest, but to any chance persons” and “there is no proof of this [that dreams are sent by God]: for quite common men have prescience and vivid dreams, which shows that these are not sent by God” (both from On Prophecy in Sleep).
Sounds a bit like sour grapes.
In any case, this background perhaps throws into relief the Bible’s emphasis on the Spirit of prophecy poured out on “all flesh,” and Jesus’ promise that his fishermen disciples (just the kind of commoners that should not receive revelation from God) would hear and see what prophets and righteous men longed to see and hear, but didn’t.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 28, 2010 at 1:27 pm
In his 1519 lectures on Galatians, Luther had this to say about Galatians 1-5: “Now is not the fact that faith is reckoned as righteousness a receiving of the Spirit? So either [Paul] proves nothing or the reception of the Spirit and the fact that faith is reckoned as righteousness will be the same thing. And this is true; it is introduced in order that the divine imputation may not be regarding as amounting to nothing outside of God, as some thing that the Apostle’s word ‘grace’ means a favorable disposition rather than a gift. For when God is favorable and when He imputes, the Spirit is really received, both the gift and the grace.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 6:37 am
In contrast to later Scholasticism, Peter Lombard argued that the grace given to the soul was not merely a gift from God but God’s gift of Himself. He refuted those who thought that “the Holy Spirit, God Himself, is not given, but His gifts, which are not the Spirit Himself. And as they say, the Holy Spirit is said to be given, when His grace, which, however, is not Himself, is given to men.”
He quoted Augustine, who wrote, “He himself is, therefore, the One who has been given from Heaven on Pentecost Day. In what manner, therefore, is God not the one who gives the Holy Spirit? Nay how much is God the one who gives God?” Lombard adds, “Behold with these words [Augustine] openly says that the Holy Spirit, that is God Himself, is given to men by the Father and the Son.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 6:31 am
Is Christ ever without His body?
Might as well ask, Is Christ ever without His Spirit? The answer to that is, obviously, No. Anointing with the Spirit is what makes Christ Christ.
And the Spirit gathers and knits together what He gathers.
Hence: To say “Christ is anointed by the Spirit” is to say “Totus Christus.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, October 16, 2010 at 4:19 am
James Miller reviews John Yates’s The Spirit and Creation in Paul (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament 2.Reihe)
“Yates contends that when Paul speaks of the Spirit giving life, he does so within the field of discourse generated by the texts from Genesis and Ezekiel. In 1 Cor 15, Gen 2:7 serves as the linchpin of Paul’s argument (15:45–47) that the Spirit gives life through the resurrection of the dead. In 2 Cor 3, the background for Paul’s discussion of the life-giving Spirit comes from both his argument from 1 Cor 15 and the language of Ezek 36–37. This conceptual framework naturally leads to Paul’s conclusion in 2 Cor 5:17 that those in Christ are part of ‘new creation.’ Finally, in his discussion of Rom 5–8, Yates again finds Paul’s language of the Spirit and life reliant upon Ezekiel. Thus, the divine Spirit both enables moral transformation (Rom 8:1–4) but also serves as the means for both human resurrection (8:9–11) and the renewal of all creation (8:18–23).”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, June 18, 2010 at 12:22 pm
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