Discussing Barth’s distinction of the “church of Esau” and the “church of Jacob” in the Romerbrief , Michael Horton ( People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology ) gets Barth’s weaknesses exactly right. First, “Barth seems to assume that . . . . Continue Reading »
In his Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (1989), Thomas Wiedemann remarks on the difference between pagan and Christian conceptions of infant death: “For the pagan, premature death was a disaster because the child’s life was wasted; for Augustine, a child who died prematurely . . . . Continue Reading »
Erik Peterson ( Das Buch von den Engeln ) points out that the new song of Revelation 5 is sung by people from every tongue and nation and people. Thus, “the hymn of the church is the transcending of all national hymns, as the speech of the church is the transcending of all . . . . Continue Reading »
Is the church a polis herself? Or a replacement for the pagan cults at the heart of the ancient polis? There might be another way to say it. Erik Peterson ( Das Buch von den Engeln , 1935) points to the NT language about a heavenly Jerusalem of which Christians are citizens. He . . . . Continue Reading »
Drake notes that Burckhardt sees Constantine’s reign “exclusively in terms of a power struggle between Constantine and the bishops,” and shrewdly recognizes that this is in turn rooted in “an even older premise that the church became ‘worldly’ as a result of . . . . Continue Reading »
Tertullian again, denying that the church is a “faction”: “But who has ever suffered harm from our assemblies? We are in our congregations just what we are when separated from each other; we are as a community what we areindividuals; we injure nobody, we trouble nobody. When the . . . . Continue Reading »
In an essay on the “authority of the church in temporal matters,” de Lubac writes, “Since the supernatural is not separated from nature, and the spiritual is always mixed wtih the temporal, the Chuch has eminent authority - always in proportion to the spiritual element present - . . . . Continue Reading »
Gerard Schlabach, though working in a Yoderian tradition, warns that wholesale condemnation of “Constantinianism” is a mistake: “there is even something right about the vision of Christendom - as that societas in which every right relationship with God is rightly ordering and . . . . Continue Reading »
How does de Lubac’s interest in nature/grace fit into his ecclesiological concerns? It might seem that his effort to integrate nature and grace could support the juridical notion of the church expressed in Vatican I. Operating on a strict nature/supernatural distinction, one might see the . . . . Continue Reading »
Wise cautions from de Lubac on any effort to ease the tensions that have historically existed between church and civil order: “We can without difficulty concede the point that whichever side the absorption were effected from, everything would become infinitely simpler and much more . . . . Continue Reading »
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