Peter J. Leithart

Yahweh is going to bring a day of vengeance and recompense on behalf of Zion, Isaiah prophesies (Isaiah 34). He will take up Zion’s complaint, her case ( rib ) against the Edomites, and will devastate that nation. Nothing is left standing when the Lord’s sword has finished its slaughter . . . . Continue Reading »

The end of metaphysics is old news, Robert Alan Sparling reminds us in Johann Georg Hamann and the Enlightenment Project : “It is one of the Enlightenment’s enduring legacies to reject both faith and ‘obscure metaphysics’ in the same breath. This post-metaphysical aspect of . . . . Continue Reading »

Ruth is the only book of the Tanakh that ends with a genealogy, notes Stephen Dempster ( Dominion and Dynasty: A Biblical Theology of the Hebrew Bible , 193). The “ten-member genealogy powerfully echoes two other ten-member genealogies in the narrative books that had soteriological . . . . Continue Reading »

Stephen Dempster ( Dominion and Dynasty: A Biblical Theology of the Hebrew Bible ) points to the various ways that the end of Genesis anticipates the blessing of Israel flowing to Gentiles. When Jacob moves to Goshen, Joseph introduces him to Pharaoh. What ensues is “not just two individuals . . . . Continue Reading »

Kirsten Powers reports on the attacks on Christians in Egypt , described by one Egyptian scholar as “the worst violence against the Coptic Church since the 14th century”: “USA Today reports that “forty churches have been looted and torched, while 23 others have been attacked . . . . Continue Reading »

In an essay on Tennyson, John Stuart Mill insists that great poets must be great thinkers: “Every great poet, every poet who has extensively or permanently influenced mankind, has been a great thinker;—has had a philosophy, though perhaps he did not call it by that name;—has had . . . . Continue Reading »

Zephaniah 3’s description of God exalting over Israel as a husband over his bride has created some difficulties for interpreters. According to on Balserak ( Divinity Compromised: A Study of Divine Accommodation in the Thought of John Calvin ), Conrad Pellican and Bucer argue that since . . . . Continue Reading »

Stephen Dempster ends his 2003 Dominion and Dynasty: A Biblical Theology of the Hebrew Bible with this sharp summary of the “hour-glass” logic of typology: “Typological features emerge naturally when the biblical text is understood as a Text. This is particularly clear for the . . . . Continue Reading »

Is God the God of Abraham? It seems impossible: How could “of Abraham” be a description of God if Abraham’s existence is contingent (as it certainly is)? Should we then say that God is not essentially the God of Abraham but only voluntarily so? That solution doesn’t satisfy . . . . Continue Reading »

Harrison ( ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment , 12-13) argues that the Platonic revival of the Renaissance was one of the key sources for the modern notion of “religion.” The point is clearest in Ficino: “In De Christiana Religione (1474), he . . . . Continue Reading »