According to D.C. Schindler’s account ( Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic , 42-3), Plato is not an idealist searching for a “pure” starting point. On the contrary, he knows that the search for such a standpoint is chimerical. The . . . . Continue Reading »
Sheehan ends his Representations (2009) by noting the cost of privatizing sacrifice, and with it religion: “The modern ethic of sacrifice denuded of utility, unhinged from exchange and divorced from law, bears virtually no resemblance to its early modern incarnations. Now sacrifice stands . . . . Continue Reading »
In his Discourses on Livy , Machiavelli pointed to the place of sacrifice in the establishment of Roman order. Sheehan ( Representations , 2009) summarizes the argument: “The Samnites knew that ‘it was necessary to induce obstinacy in the spirits of the soldiers, and that to induce it . . . . Continue Reading »
In a 2009 article on “sacrifice before the secular” in Representations , Jonathan Sheehan summarizes Wellhausen’s account of the history of sacrifice. In its original forms, sacrifice was both spiritual and secular, a seamless union of “spiritual solemnity and secular . . . . Continue Reading »
Pat Rogers reviews what sounds like a fascinating new study, Wolfram Schmidgen’s Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England . In Schmidgen’s view “mixture is at the heart of everything, a constitutive part of meaning in all cultural activity. Far from . . . . Continue Reading »
The flood of Gentiles overwhelms Judah in three waves in the book of Isaiah. The first of these is the threat from Aram and Israel, from Syria and the Northern kingdom. Assyria is the rising power to the east, and that power is threatening to overrun the nations to the west of Assyria. The kings of . . . . Continue Reading »
In his editorial introduction to Sermons and Discourses, 1720-1723 (The Works of Jonathan Edwards Series, Volume 10) (v. 10) (228-30), Wilson Kimnach emphasizes the central importance of typology in Edwards’s thinking. It was not simply a way of harmonizing old and new, but a clue to a . . . . Continue Reading »
In his Notes on the Apocalypse (in Apocalyptic Writings (The Works of Jonathan Edwards Series, Volume 5) (v. 5) , 131-2), Edwards offers this lovely typological meditation on the marriage of Isaac, into which he weaves a meditation on the role of the ministry in adorning Christ’s bride: . . . . Continue Reading »
Bombaro ( Jonathan Edwardss Vision of Reality: The Relationship of God to the World, Redemption History, and the Reprobate , 91-2) quotes these passages from Edwards Micellanies indicating that God would have unrealized attributes if He had not created the world: “There are many of the divine . . . . Continue Reading »
1721 was a crucial year not only for Jonathan Edwards’s spiritual formation but for his metaphysics. According to John Bombaro ( Jonathan Edwardss Vision of Reality: The Relationship of God to the World, Redemption History, and the Reprobate , 12), it was from that date that Edwards . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
