Peter J. Leithart

“If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God . . . and it will be given to him,” James says in today’s sermon text. James is alluding to the story of Solomon asking for wisdom to judge the vast nation of Israel. According to James, we can all be Solomons. We can all be kings . . . . Continue Reading »

John 20:28: Thomas answered and said to Him, My Lord and my God. Let us pray. Father, You raised Your Son Jesus from the dead to bring a new day. Strengthen our faith by Your Spirit, so that we may believe the things written and so participate more and more in the power of His indestructible life . . . . Continue Reading »

So says Calvin, doctor of divine sovereignty. Commenting on John 14:18, he writes, “We . . . imagine to ourselves but a half-Christ, and a mutilated Christ, if he does not lead us to God.” In John 17, when Jesus speaks of Himself as One with the Father, we must remember that Jesus is . . . . Continue Reading »

Canlis notes two revolutionary innovations in Calvin’s doctrine of the Spirit: “First, he has shifted the primary bond between the human Jesus and the Father from divine substance to the divine person of the Spirit.” That enables Calvin to rescue Chalcedon from confusion: . . . . Continue Reading »

According to Calvin, prior to the fall “direct communication with God was the source of life to Adam.” By the tree of life, “Adam was admonished, that he could claim nothing for himself as if it were his own, in order that he might depend wholly upon the Son of God, and might not . . . . Continue Reading »

In her recent Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension , Julie Canlis argues, following the work of Peter Wyatt, that Thomas displaces Christ from the center of his explanation of the “golden circle” of movement away from and return to God. Wyatt says that the . . . . Continue Reading »

Jenson offers a corrective to Thomas’s cycle of exitus-reditus , according to which all things that come from God are ordered to return. This is “misleading,” Jenson says, “since saving history is God’s journey with us , not our journey away from and back to . . . . Continue Reading »

Everyone knows how to summarize Calvinism. It’s TULIP. And it’s a venerable summary, going all the way back to Dordt. Not so, argues Ken Stewart in his recent Ten Myths About Calvinism: Recovering the Breadth of the Reformed Tradition . On page 291, Stewart reproduces a page from a 1913 . . . . Continue Reading »

Bauckham notes that the census of the sealed in Revelation 7 hearkens back to the censuses of Israel in the Old Testament, which were typically of a military character. He concludes that the numbered and sealed are an arm, sealed like the soldiers of a Roman legion with the mark of their commander. . . . . Continue Reading »

Bauckham gives a plausible explanation of the “parable” of the two witnesses in Revelation 11. The witnesses, he notes, are Elijah-like as well as Mosaic, and against this background the killing of “7000” is suggestive. In 1 Kings 19, the 7000 are a remnant who keep faith . . . . Continue Reading »