Every Sunday

is Reformation Sunday.

A Few Posts You Should Have Read

I don’t know why you’d read anything here if you aren’t reading Peter Leithart, but in case you aren’t these are must reads:

Why the opposite of love isn’t hate but apathy.

Love is “as strong as the grave” and ardor “as hard as Sheol.”  Both descriptions are arresting because they attribute a kind of violence to love.

“Strong” describes the driving wind of the exodus (Exodus 14:21), the raging waters of the sea that swallowed up Pharaoh (Nehemiah 9:11).  It describes anger (Genesis 49:7), the harshness of a king (Isaiah 19:4), the fierce faces of Gentiles invading Israel (Deuteronomy 28:50).

“Hard” is used to describe Israel’s servitude in Egypt (Exodus 1:14; 6:9), the Egypt-like hardness of Israel’s life under Solomon (1 Kings 12:4), hard hearts (Ezekiel 3:7) and faces (Ezekiel 2:4), violent winds (Isaiah 27:8) and the turmoil of battle (2 Samuel 2:17).

Love is not a soft passion.

But more, love is a match for every difficulty Israel faces.  The sea that threatens Israel may be strong, but Yahweh’s love is more than enough.  A king may be harsh, and invaders cruel, but love is as strong as death.

Pharaoh subjected Israel to bitter and hard bondage, but love is as hard as Sheol.  Israel’s own hearts may be stubborn, stony as flint, and they may set their faces like rock against the Lord, but His love is more stubborn still.  The hard wind that drives Israel out of exile is Yahweh’s own wind, and it’s through this exile that Judah will find forgiveness.  If the nations are a vehement wind, Yahweh is too, for He is Wind and blows where He wishes.

All opposing “strengths” and “hardnesses” are forms of death, threats to life and limb.  But love is as strong as death, Yahweh’s ardor as hard as Sheol.

Late medieval theology in 4 short sentences.

Late medieval theologians were divided, we’re told, between intellectualists and voluntarists.  The first took God’s intellect to be “prior” to His will, and believed His will conforms to His reason.  The latter put the will in the place of “priority” and said that God’s intellect is as it is because He wills it to be so.

It’s a sterile debate, and misses what the Bible places in the position of “priority”: Neither reason nor will but Word.

Why Perichoresis Blows a Hole in Marcionism.

Hegel’s “sublation” seems to be a conceptual vestige of perichoresis.

Sublation requires the Trinity: If all is one, nothing other can be absorbed within being destroyed.  If we have sheer differentiation, all is utterly other.

Hegel is right: Sublation happens.  Aquinas does absorb Aristotle, so that Aristotle is still recognizably there even though he’s been sublated into a new system.  Marx does the same to Hegel.  Shall we say too that the New Testament does the same to the Old.

Sublation is simply the indwelling of the other within the same, the old within the new.  But the indwelling goes the other way as well, since once the old is absorbed into the new, the new cannot be understood without the old.

Hegel’s aspiration was to arrive at a point where thought itself was Christian.  Seems that he made some progress toward that end.

My new motto these days is “Know Other People” and this post is a good start explaining why.

It is not good for man to be alone.  Hegel says, It is impossible.

“I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other.  I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other – and I am only because I have peace with myself; if I did not have it, then I would be a contradiction that falls to pieces.  This other, because it likewise exists outside itself, has its self-consciousness only in me, and both the other and I are only this consciousness of being-outside-ourselves and of our identity; we are only this intuition, felling, and knowledge of our unity.  This is love, and without knowing that love is both a distinction and the sublation of the distinction, one speaks emptily of it.  This is the simple, eternal idea.”

Williams explains: “Our thinking . . . is ultimately radical loving: ecstasy, being-outside-ourselves.”

My Third Favorite Prayer Ever

O God, our heavenly Father; We thank Thee for all things beautiful and good which Thou has made. We praise Thee for all the joy and happiness of our lives; For the land of our birth; For the homes in which we live; And for our friends. We praise Thee that Thou didst send to us the Lord Jesus Christ; That He gave us an example of how we ought to live; That He died for us upon the cross; That He rose again from the dead, and ever prays for us. Help us to remember all that Thou hast given to us; And to love Thee with all our heart; for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord; To whom, with Thee and the Holy Spirit, be the glory and the praise, for evermore. Amen.

5 Myths / Urban Legends about John Calvin

Myth No.1: John Calvin was a sour puss.

Myth No.2: Calvin was a tyrant.

Myth No.3: Calvin and Calvinism are identical.

Myth No. 4: Calvin was a religious fanatic.

Myth No. 5: Calvin was sadistic.

from Michael Jinkins via Per Crucem ad Lucem

Why Peter Leithart is Smarter than You

The following is a list of literary and pop references from Deep Exegesis.

Poets:

Czeslaw Milosz
Clive James
George Herbert
John Donne
Andrew Marvell
W.B. Yeats
T.S. Eliot
William Shakespeare
Samuel Coleridge
John Ciardi
Dylan Thomas
Samuel Beckett
Ovid
Virgil
Homer
Seamus Heaney
Piercy Shelley
Dante Aligheri
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Aeschylus
Robert Penn Warren
Edmund Spenser
Henry Beard
William Blake
Sophocles

Writers:
Umberto Eco
Jane Austin
Ian McEwan
Cormac McCarthy
Philip Roth
E.M. Forster
Gustave Flaubert
Herman Melville
James Joyce
Thomas Pynchon
Grimm Bros.
Jorge Luis Borges
Richard Adams
Kenneth Grahames
Tom Clancy
Daniel Defoe
Raymond Russel
Tom Stoppard
G.K. Chesterton
Aristotle

Works Mentioned:
Enuma Elish
Epic of Gilgamesh
Canterbury Tales
Beowulf
Mother Goose
Three Little Pigs

Musicians:
Sony and Cher
J.S. Bach
Ludwig von Beethoven
Wolfgang Mozart

Cinema:
Harrison Ford
Coen Bros.
Heath Ledger
Shrek
Beauty and the Beast
Matrix
Lion King
Cast Away
Groundhog Day
Shakespeare in Love
Bill Murray
Joseph Fiennes
Gwyneth Paltrow