Peter J. Leithart

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” We miss the full force of John’s Advent announcement if we understand “flesh” as “body” or “human nature.” In the Bible, flesh names a particular quality of human life. It is Scripture’s global term for the physical and moral condition of postlapsarian existence… . Continue Reading »

JN Figgis ( Studies of Political Thought From Gerson to Grotius ) writes, “In the Middle Ages the Church was not a State, but the State; the State or rather the civil authority (for a separate society was not recognized) was merely the police department of the Church. The latter took over . . . . Continue Reading »

Dumont argues that the Gelasian “two powers” theory is often misread. The theory is not a simple hierarchy, the state subordinated to the church, but a ” hierarchical complementarity .” Priests are indeed superior to kings, but they are “subordinate to the king in . . . . Continue Reading »

Like many scholars, Louis Dumont ( Essays on Individualism ) traces the development of modern conceptions of social order, individualism, and politics to Ockham: Ockham denied that general terms have any reality: “Ockham goes so far in his polemics against the Pope as to deny that there is . . . . Continue Reading »

“For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks . . . . Continue Reading »

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 . . . . Continue Reading »

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 . . . . Continue Reading »

Anatiolios offers this explanation of Athanasius’ defense of homoousios : “the meaning of the Nicene homoousios is contained in its function as a guide to a certain way of reading Scripture. An immediate hermeneutical consequence of this principle is that efforts to understand this term . . . . Continue Reading »

By insisting that “Creator” is a name intrinsic to God’s essence, Athanasius steps back into the problems from which Arianism arose in the first place. Anatolios notes that the debates about “Origen’s speculation that the title ‘Almighty,’ as a designation . . . . Continue Reading »

Khaled Anatolios points out in his Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine that Athanasius charges that the Arians cannot truly honor God as Creator. The reasoning is: “If the Word is Creator and the Word is extrinsice to the divine essence, then the creative . . . . Continue Reading »