Nothing But the Cross

After a two-year sabbatical to share two other wonderful homilies (here and here), I return to my tradition of re-posting Peter Leithart's 2006 Good Friday Homily:

Paul determined to know nothing but Jesus and the cross. Was that enough? To answer that question, we need to answer another: What is the cross? The cross is the work of the Father, who gave His Son in love for the world; the cross is the work of the Son, who did not cling to equality with God but gave Himself to shameful death; the cross is the work of the Spirit, through whom the Son offers Himself to the Father and who is poured out by the glorified Son. The cross displays the height and the depth and the breadth of eternal Triune love.

The cross is the light of the world; on the cross Jesus is the firmament, mediating between heaven and earth; the cross is the first of the fruit-bearing trees, and on the cross Jesus shines as the bright morning star; on the cross Jesus is sweet incense arising to heaven, and He dies on the cross as True Man to bring the Sabbath rest of God.

Click to read more ...

Leithart Comes out Swinging for Natural Law

In an invigorating new post at First Things On the Square, Peter Leithart argues, as one might expect him to, for the importance of Christians being willing to say "Jesus is Lord" and use the Bible in the public square, against any theories of secular natural law that imply the possibility of common, atheological norms for political life.  

But, in what is at the very least a significant shift from his usual emphasis, Leithart grants the basic validity and importance of natural law as a key pillar of theological ethics and Christian public life: 

"Natural law theory has many uses. Using its categories, we explore the contours of creation to uncover the pathways the Creator has laid out for us. Natural law reasoning can demonstrate the “fit” between creation and revelation. The fact that women, not men, bear babies is ethically significant, as is the fact that human beings talk but animals don’t. Natural law is rhetorically useful for advancing arguments and purposes that would be rejected out of hand if stated in overtly religious terms."

The problem comes only when we pretend that we could give meaningful content and force to this natural law without any recourse to revelation, or that we can wave the banner of natural law without waving the banner of King Jesus.  

Though the post is quite short and offers only the merest hints about what this relationship looks like for Christian theory and practice, perhaps it is not too much to see here a good dose of Hooker, for whom "nature hath need of grace and grace hath use of nature."

Some Much-Needed Clarity on American Empire

In a recent piece for First Things On the Square, Peter Leithart has at last given us a sneak peek at some of the refreshing and illuminating thoughts on "empire" (which is to say, in our current setting, American empire) that have been gestating inside his fertile brain for the past couple years.  His uncanny ability to bring balance and clarity to highly polarized discussions thick with the fog of war is a great asset for this controversial topic.  Many right-wing Christians still need to be brought to a sober reassessment of their nation's evildoings, but without losing all sense of perspective and hurtling headlong into whichever left-wing or anarchist ideology promises the most fervent denunciation of American empire.  

In his mini-essay, "Towards a Sensible Discussion of Empire," Leithart offers ten modest theses, many of which are "truisms . . . so obvious that it is telling that they have become controversial."  Indeed, it is remarkable how many of these truisms will immediately cause many readers (including myself) to bristle, become suspicious, or even to start casting accusations like those of one commenter who compared Leithart's argument to something that might be "made by a German academic in defense of the Nazis during the period of their rise to power."  Such suspicion is perhaps not a bad thing—we should always be suspicious of any claim that appears to serve the interests of those in power—but it should not keep us from being sensible, and recognizing the difference between a truth and the abuse of a truth.  I won't of course repost the whole essay here, but will simply call attention to a couple of the most fruitful contributions it makes.

Click to read more ...

Some Tasty Morsels of Blogdom

Is it just me, or has the blogosphere churned out some unusually fine fare over the past week or so?  Well, the narrow corner of it I sample certainly has.  Here's some highlights you should check out:

Peter Leithart bucks the Moscow trend by offering a qualified endorsement at First Things of the recent growth of evangelical interest in social justice.  In particular, he turns to the Torah to confirm the importance of this concern, but also to critique facile equations of Christian justice with welfare statism.  If we want to care for the poor the way God wants, we should pay careful attention to the view of property and poverty enshrined in these laws, and the way they worked in practice, rather than simply appealing to vague "Jubilee principles."  Any regular reader of this blog knows that this has been a prominent theme in my own thinking and writing for the past couple years, and that Leithart is my patron saint--so naturally, I was pretty jazzed about this essay.

Stewart Clem at Transpositions offers the finest reflection I have yet encountered on Tree of Life, a film of breathtaking beauty and theological depth which has occupied my thoughts daily since I saw it two weeks ago.  The gist of Clem's reading--the film is not, in fact, about the dichotomy of nature and grace, as it seems to claim; rather, it teaches us that nature is graced, and it is only our fallen distortions of it that make us unable to recognize it.

Davey Henreckson, after a long period of comparative blogging dormancy, has erupted in the last week with a pair of fine posts on Annabel Brett's new book Changing States.  The most recent of these, on the relationship of natural virtue and God's law in early Protestant political theology, is right up my alley, even majoring on that oft-neglected but ever-fascinating Florentine, Peter Martyr Vermigli.

Finally, Jeremy Kidwell, having just migrated to a new blog home, www.domesticatedtheology.com, offers some provocative reflections on Protestantism, vocations, and intentional communities.  This post almost exactly echoed some thoughts that I recently shared with a friend, and that I've been continuing to reflect on; I never discussed them with Jeremy, but we did have a meal together that day...must've been some mental osmosis going on.

Some Natural Law Goodies

I'm finally back and ready to start revving up my blogging engines for a summer full of many words, tags, and comments; but if I may be excused for the moment in indulging in what may look like another cop-out, I'll use this post to point to some other interesting blog-posts that have just been written, which offer a good sketch of what the attempt to recover of a Reformational natural-law concept looks like, and suggest that Moscow, despite undeniable tensions and ambiguities, might not be too far off from it after all.  

See first Peter Leithart's post, "Augustine and Saeculum."

Then see a thoughtful interaction by Steven Wedgeworth, "Secular? Private? It All Depends What You Mean" (valuable especially for the comments section, where Wedgeworth seeks to clarify the traditional idea of natural law in defence against the knee-jerk antipathy to it that many of us have inherited).

And then Doug Wilson offers a helpful take on the idea of natural law with his typical gift for down-to-earth illustrations: "Natural Law and the Brownies."

I hope to offer my own take on all of this at some point soon (or this summer at any rate), so consider this for now just a bookmark.