Peter J. Leithart

The created things that are added to the choir in Revelation 5:13 are divided into four zones: Heaven, earth, under the earth, and sea: Angelic beings and sky creatures, the sun, moon, and stars; all humans and earth-creatures; all dead beings that have been inserted into the earth; and the sea as . . . . Continue Reading »

One reads Bultmann on eschatology and thinks, How Kantian! Then one thinks: Or is it the other way round? Is Bultmann a Kantianization of Christian eschatology, or is Kant a philosophical riff on Lutheran or Pietist eschatology? One reads Bultmann on history and eschatology and hears Derrida . . . . Continue Reading »

In her fascinating The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany , Susan Karant-Nunn notes that Protestants in Germany continued to observe some traditional medieval Lenten prohibitions: “Night weddings, except for people of high rank, were widely prohibited. In Saxony, . . . . Continue Reading »

Bryan Spinks summarizes some of the debates concerning the Book of Common Prayer in his essay in The Oxford History of Christian Worship . During 1549, Parliament considered the adoption of a uniform liturgy for the church of England, and this event was recorded by Charles Wriothesley: “at . . . . Continue Reading »

Nathan Mitchell points out in his essay in The Oxford History of Christian Worship that “just as Luther wanted to retain Lent, Palm Sunday, and Holy Week (though not their obligatory fasts and ceremonial ‘trickery’), so he wanted all liturgy to ‘center in the Word and . . . . Continue Reading »

Some of my thoughts on how Christians should talk in public are on offer here today: http://www.firstthings.com/ . . . . Continue Reading »

Rick Santorum recently criticized Obama’s worldview as a “phony theology not based on the Bible.” A few days ago, the Drudge Report resurrected a 2008 speech in which Santorum warned that Satan has it in for the U.S. Santorum’s blatantly religious comments have already made him an object of ridicule and will doubtless cost him support. My cynicism meter goes as wild as anyone’s when politicians talk like this. Still, I find it invigorating. … Continue Reading »

If the populace thinks at all about Antiochene and Alexandrian theology, then the popular view is that the Antiochenes are the more earthy of the two, the school more interested in and grounded in the human life of the man Jesus. In a 2008 essay in St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly , . . . . Continue Reading »

A couple of years Michael Horton wrote the following in a Christianity Today article on Lent: “For the most part, the Protestant Reformers continued to celebrate Lent, but in a more evangelical way. They inveighed against the connection between fasting and penance ‘as a work of merit or . . . . Continue Reading »

Hugh Latimer preached three series of Lenten sermons before Edward VI. In the seventh of his 1549 sermons, he explained the purpose behind Lent (I have updated the spelling): “All thing that be written, they be written to be our doctrine. By occasion of this text . . . I have walked this Lent . . . . Continue Reading »