Books, Essays, and Articles
Here you can find information about books and/or articles I've published, as well as significant unpublished papers that I've written over the past couple years. These latter are available for download. However, since some of them may be used in future published work, please out of courtesy shoot me an email and let me know if you've downloaded one. This will help me keep track of where my work's going, and I'd also love to hear any constructive feedback you have.
Books
The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity
Foreword by Peter J. Leithart. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2009. 214 pp.
"Deeply sympathetic to the Mercersburg theologians, Nevin and Schaff, Littlejohn presents a plea for Reformed theology to take Church, sacraments, and apostolic succession seriously as divine means of salvation. By linking Mercersburg to the Oxford Movement, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Catholic movement of nouvelle théologie, this book contributes toward a renewal of Reformed theology. Littlejohn's ressourcement of the Mercersburg Theology is courageous and stands as a model of solid ecumenical theology."
—Hans Boersma, author of Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross and Nouvelle Théologie & Sacramental Ontology
More information and endorsements here.
"Servants of God" and Followers of Christ: A New Look at Civil Authority in Romans 13
(Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, forthcoming . . . eh, when I get around to it).
The Mystical Presence and the Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord's Supper
First volume in the Mercersburg Theology Study Series, of which I am serving as General Editor.
Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers; forthcoming spring 2012.
See more information in Projects.
Book Chapters
"Sola Scriptura and the Public Square: Richard Hooker and a Protestant Paradigm for Political Engagement."
In The Bible: Culture, Community, and Society. Edited by Angus Paddison and Neil Messer. Edinburgh: T&T Clark; forthcoming 2013.
"The Privation of Property: Property Rights, Capitalism, and the Christian Tradition."
In Render Unto God: Christianity and Capitalism Reconsidered. Edited by Ryan McIlhenny. Lanham, MD: University Press of America; forthcoming 2012.
Articles
"Calvin and Commerce: The Transforming Power of Calvinism in Market Economies"
A sharply critical review of the recent book in the Calvin 500 Series by David Hall and Matthew Burton.
Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 28/2 (Autumn 2010): 227-29.
"Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought"
A critical review of the recent book by David VanDrunen.
Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 29/1 (Spring 2011).
"The Hebrew Republic"
A short review of the excellent book by Eric Nelson (2010).
Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 29/1 (Spring 2011)
Unpublished Papers
These are a few of the papers I wrote during my final three years of coursework (two years of an M.A. in Theology at New St. Andrews College, one year of an M.Th. in Theological Ethics at University of Edinburgh). There were many other papers, of course, but I decided to limit myself here to those of substantial length, which did not require lengthy explanations regarding context and rationale (since many of the NSA papers were idiosyncratic to say the least). If you are interested in any other papers, or my Master's Thesis on the hermeneutics of Reformation political thought, just shoot me an email.
I wouldn't stand by everything in all of these papers, but hopefully they represent solid work which may be useful and illuminating on the whole.
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Community, Complaint, and Catharsis: The Persona Shifts in Lamentations
(166K)(May 2008) Written for an M.A. class in Old Testament Prophets with Dr. Leithart. This paper sets out to decode just why it is that in Lamentations, the voice of the speaker and the object of his address are constantly shifting. Is there a pattern to these complex shifts of speaker and listener, and if so, what does it tell us about the meaning of the book? I argue that these shifts create a powerful and passionate narrative arc, as the poet seeks to make sense of the horror that has been visited upon him and upon Jerusalem, and finally comes to a confidence in Yahweh’s justice. -
A Shattered Prism: The Polyphonous and Evanescent Structure of Genesis 1
(213K)(December 2007) Written for an M.A. class in Old Testament--Pentateuch. This paper started, as all good papers do, with a simple question: why is it that the supposed repeating parallel structure in the Genesis 1 creation account is not really a repeating parallel structure? Rather, it is constantly varying, so that no two acts of creation are exactly parallel. Only one commentator that I could find seemed to take real note of the problem, and he did not explore it in depth. So that’s what I decided to do. The result raised many more questions than it answered, and all I can do is hint at some hypotheses of why Genesis 1 might have all this complexity. But the structural observations along the way are pretty cool, if I do say so myself. -
Explaining Explanation
(203K)(October 2008) Written as a term paper for an M.A. Philosophy of Science class with Dr. Mitch Stokes. This was a very fun paper. In it, I explore the insoluble dilemmas into which various theories of scientific explanation fall, and suggest that the problem is that all of them avoid the real question of explanation, which is not “How?” but “Why?” The “why?” question requires teleology, something that modern science refuses to touch, confining itself to Aristotle’s other three causes. I uncover the inadequacies of modern theories of scientific explanation by examining an article by Richard Swinburne and its rebuttal by the brilliant and enigmatic philosopher Stephen Clark. Swinburne seeks to use the limits of scientific explanation theories to argue for the existence of God, but Clark, a neo-Platonist Christian, debunks his argument, showing how Swinburne’s unwillingness to use a teleological account of causality in nature renders his argument useless. -
From Swords to Plowshares
(200K)(May 2008) Ironically enough, when I set up this website, I had forgotten entirely about this paper, or about the title (you’ll notice that since transplanting across the ocean, my spelling has partially changed). This paper, however, captures in many ways the same sorts of questions that I hope to explore here, as you will see from the “What is the S&P?” section. This was the final integrated paper I had to write for the M.A. program at NSA, and it was also my most daring, written not as a normal paper, but as seventy-eight aphoristic segments, arranged according to a form suggested by the book of Lamentations (I hope you pick up on what it is--two of the three grading professors did not, and hence couldn’t make sense of it). In the “integrated paper” assignments, I was called upon to do the impossible--write a 30-page paper pulling together insights from each of the term’s four classes, and, without over-generalizing, weave them into a coherent and compelling argument. So in each case I decided to have fun with it and do something creative (for me), and I generally ended up fairly happy with the “argument” that emerged. In this paper, I was called upon to integrate OT--Prophetic Books, Eschatology, Beauty, and Political Theology, and the result was...well, you’ll have to see for yourself. -
In Him Was Life: The Mysterious Christology and Soteriology of the Fourth Gospel
(244K)(December 2008) Written for an M.A. class in Christology for Peter Leithart. In this paper, I consider the theme of “life” as it appears repatedly in John’s Gospel, as a key structuring motif of his Christology and soteriology. By close attention to several passages, I suggest the following picture: the Son possessed “life” in the fullest sense--the life of the divine Trinity. By his Incarnation, this life was encompassed in human form, thus giving us men access to it through our union with Christ. This life is a life that triumphs over death, and yet, when it does so, the life beyond death is a fuller form of life, suggesting that the Incarnate Christ comes to participate more fully in the Trinitarian life after his Resurrection--he becomes more fully divinized. Our union with the Son who is Life guarantees that our bodies too will overcome death and pass through it into a higher form of life. In all of this, I suggest, John presents us with a soteriology that resonates with many themes in Eastern Orthodox theology. -
Jesus Meets Moses: A New Take on the Man with the Withered Hand in Mark 3:1-6
(204K)(October 2008) Written as a term paper for an M.A. class on the book of Mark by Dr. Leithart. During the term, a guest lecturer from the University of Idaho, Dr. Kurt Queller, had presented an unpublished paper in which he argued that the healing of the man with the withered hand in Mark 3:1-6 is built on typological echoes of the Exodus story. Taking his work as my starting point, I seek to argue in this paper that the typology is even more intriguing than we would think at first glance, for in this “Exodus” story, Jesus plays the role of Yahweh, and the man with the withered hand is Moses. -
Nature, Freedom, and the Common Good: Property Rights in the Catholic Tradition
(214K)(April 2010) Written for an M.Th course in Christian Political Thought for Oliver O'Donovan. In this paper, I examine three different Catholic views on the basis of private property rights: Thomas Aquinas, Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum), and Hilaire Belloc. I argue, more or less, that Aquinas's formulation, in which private property is justified only as a means for facilitating orderly common use, is superior to subsequent formulations in Rerum Novarum (which tends toward a Lockean establishment of private property as a primordial natural right), and in Belloc and the Distributists, who tend to make individual freedom the value that necessitates private property, thus perhaps conceding more than they would like to the capitalist paradigm. However, I allow that Distributism can helpfully augment Aquinas's account in certain ways. I will be building on this paper for future writing. -
The Elusive Gift: Reclaiming Ethics as Response to Divine Grace
(178K)(December 2009) Written for an M.Th course in Christian Ethics for Prof. Michael Northcott. This paper summarizes recent work on the ethics of gift-giving by ethicists like John Milbank and Stephen Webb, and seeks to apply this account of the gift as a paradigm for ethics as a whole. Does God's gift of grace generate an ethical response as counter-gift? If so, does it necessitate it? If the response is necessitated, is it still a gift? And are we even capable of giving anything to God? And if we are, can we expect anything in return? I explore these perennial problems of theological ethics by engaging with Martin Luther and John Calvin. Luther, by seeking to construe ethical action as a pure unilateral gift to God, ends up detaching ethics from God's prevenient grace. Calvin, on the other hand, makes God's grace so weighty a gift that it overwhelms any ability for us to offer an ethical return gift. In the conclusion, I use a recent article by Jennifer Herdt to gesture towards a solution. -
The Heart of Torah: Understanding Law, Justice, and Mercy in the Old Testament
(178K)(April 2010) Written as an M.Th Supervised Research Essay for Oliver O’Donovan. In this paper, I examine the presupposition by many Old Testament scholars and ethicists that the social justice laws of the Torah are not “laws in our modern sense” and thus not really laws at all; they are moral instruction, unenforceable and directed to the conscientious individual. I argue that this is based on a faulty modern paradigm of the relation between law and morality. A careful examination of the Old Testament on its own terms will reveal that while their law was deeply infused with “morality,” it did not thereby cease to be law, and, in the small local communities of ancient Israel, could have functioned practically as genuine public law. I may be building on this paper for future writing.