Peter J. Leithart

1 Corinthians 14:26: Whenever you come together, each of you has a psalm, has a teaching, has a tongue, has a revelation, has an interpretation. Let all things be done for edification. Paul portrays the church as a body.  That captures the unity and diversity of the church.  The church is . . . . Continue Reading »

2 Kings 2:9-10: And so it was, when they had crossed over, that Elijah said to Elisha, Ask! What may I do for you, before I am taken away from you? Elisha said, Please let a double portion of your spirit be upon me. So he said, You have asked a hard thing. Nevertheless, if you . . . . Continue Reading »

“I hate your new moon festivals,” the Lord says at the beginning of Isaiah, “Bring your worthless offerings no longer; Incense is an abomination to me.” He rejects Israel’s offerings and festivals because their hands are filled with blood and because they oppress the . . . . Continue Reading »

Gregory Nazianzen ( Oration 28,9) says that negative theology is only a starting point, beyond which one must go to state what God is: ”he who is eagerly pursuing the nature of the Self-existent will not stop at saying what He is  not , but must go on beyond what He . . . . Continue Reading »

Paul quotes, alludes to, or echoes Isaiah 40-66 over twenty times in the letter to the Romans.  Many of the major moves of the letter are linked with references to Isaiah, argues J. Edward Walters. The thesis that God reveals His righteousness to the Jew first and also to the Greek is similar . . . . Continue Reading »

Where does Paul get the notion that Abraham is “heir of the world”?   Mark Forman argues in a 2009 JSNT article that it arises from Paul’s seeing the story of Abraham through the lends of Isaiah 54.  Applying Richard Hays’s criteria for identifying echoes, Forman . . . . Continue Reading »

In a 1962 article, one Leslie Allen connections Paul’s discussion of the work of the Last Adam in Romans 5 with the work of the Servant of Isaiah: ”In Paul’s great formulation of the origin and effect of sin and its redemptive counteraction in Christ (Romans v. 12 ff.) it . . . . Continue Reading »

“It used to be believed by the vulgar,” wrote Evelyn Waugh, “that there were enough pieces of this ‘true cross’ to built a battleship.”  Waugh disagreed: “In the last century a French savant, Charles Rohault de Fleury, went to the great trouble of . . . . Continue Reading »

The concept of nature is front-loaded.  Nature is what things are in their origin.  Hence physis sometimes means “birth.” Hence too Arius: If the Father is ungenerated and the Son begotten, then they must have distinct natures. Athanasius and the Cappadocians deny the premise. . . . . Continue Reading »

Aristotle argued that certain kinds of things have “a principle of motion and of stationariness,” an “innate impulse to change.”  Artificial things do not have such an impulse or principle, insofar as they are products of art, though “in so far as they happen to . . . . Continue Reading »