Peter J. Leithart

Doug Bandow summarizes a Pew Forum report on religious persecution that concludes that persecution is increasing throughout the world: “Two years ago, Pew reported that 70 percent of humanity suffered from either government persecution of or social hostility to religion. Add more moderate . . . . Continue Reading »

The Farrer quotations come pouring in. OK, trickling. Here’s one from a reader, Jeff Peterson: “Man, once endowed with speech, starts making an inventory of the universe. The speaker, having labelled everything else, labels himself, and becomes an item on his own list. He is now no more . . . . Continue Reading »

Austin Farrer makes the simple observation that “What was expressed in human terms here below was not bare deity; it was divine sonship.” Then he adds this beautiful passage: “God cannot live an identically godlike life in eternity and in a human story. But the divine Son can make . . . . Continue Reading »

Susanna Wesley thought Aristotle mistaken for positing eternal matter, but she thought that Aristotle was driven to this conclusion by the true supposition that “a true notion of the goodness of God” must lead to an idea that God “must eternally be communicating good to something . . . . Continue Reading »

In a 2005 article, David Rowe reviewed the 19th-century liberal belief that the formation of a global economy would bring enduring peace. The arguments sound a tad familiar: “Liberals identify at least three closely related means by which globalization pacifies society. First, globalization . . . . Continue Reading »

It would be difficult to find a better short statement on the inspiration of Scripture than this: “Those things revealed by God, which are contained and presented in the texts of Holy Scripture, were written under the influence of the Holy Spirit . . . . In the process of composition of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Augustine doesn’t think interpretive pluralism as a big problem: “What difficulty is it for me when these words can be interpreted in various ways, provided only that the interpretations are true? What difficulty is it for me, I say, if I understand the text in a way different from . . . . Continue Reading »

In a well-known passage in De catechizandis rudibus , Augustine explains the purpose of the whole Scripture and of redemptive history: “Thus, before all else, Christ came so that people might learn how much God loves them, and might learn this, so that they would catch fire with love for him . . . . Continue Reading »

As Robert Jenson and Michel Rene Barnes have emphasized, Gregory of Nyssa’s theology (in, eg, Against Eunomius ) centers on a meditation on God’s infinity. Greeks were reluctant to say that God is infinite, since an infinite thing cannot, by Hellenic lights, have a nature. A nature is . . . . Continue Reading »

RA Markus points out in his classic study Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine that in Augustine’s view “what prevented the Christian from being at home in his world was not that he had an alternative home in the Church, but his faith in the transformation of . . . . Continue Reading »