Peter J. Leithart

1 Corinthians 5:7: purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. As Pastor Sumpter has pointed out, the rules for using Manna are similar to the rules for Passover. Israelites were to collect enough for . . . . Continue Reading »

The Reformers picked up the definition of sacraments as “visible words” from Augustine’s Contra Faustum , Book 19. It’s not clear that they got the force of Augustine’s phrase. Bucer uses the phrase several times, but he generally conflates the “visible word” description with the . . . . Continue Reading »

Musing on Numbers 23:24, Augustine discovers Christ: “He, after all, is the cluster of grapes that hung on the tree.” . . . . Continue Reading »

Augustine asks exactly the right questions: Why did God do things in the particular way He did, when plenty of other options were open? And, why did the writers of Scripture record just these details, from among the infinite details they might have included, and why specific details that are not at . . . . Continue Reading »

In Contra Faustum , Augustine glosses Exodus 15:27 with this: “the twelve sources watering the seventy palm trees prefigure the apostaolic grace that waters the people in the number seven times ten, so that the ten commandments of the law my be fulfilled by the svenfold gift of the . . . . Continue Reading »

PROVERBS 30:18-20 Yahweh is a God of wonders. The first “wonderful thing” ( pala’ , which basically means “to separate” or “distinguish”) that He does in Scripture is to give Sarah a son in her old age, a live son from a dead womb, the wonder of . . . . Continue Reading »

Christine Yoder argues in an article on Proverbs 30 that Agur’s exhortation to humility and his puzzling observations are deliberately placed at the climax of the book so that the experience of reading the book actually inculcates the wisdom that the book talks about. She sums up the message . . . . Continue Reading »

In her The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture) , Ann Kibbey notes some intriguing parallels between Calvin’s sacramental theology and Marx’s concepts of commodity and . . . . Continue Reading »

In a letter to Landgrave Philip of Hesse, Martin Bucer said, “On our side [i.e., the Reformers’] some of us have come, in the heat of the struggle, to make constant imputations against our adversaries of which they know themselves not guilty, and of which we shall never be able to . . . . Continue Reading »

Peter Lombard writes in the Sentences , Book 4, “what is offered and consecrated by the priest is called a sacrifice and an immolation because it is a memorial and a representation of the true sacrifice and holy immolation made upon the altar of the cross. Christ died once, upon the cros, and . . . . Continue Reading »