Tag: Peter Leithart

The Antithesis for Foodies

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

Another attempt to blame it on the French Revolution (but which trencherman would not, with Woody Allen, prefer the Napoleon to Beef Wellington?):

“A retrospective examination that goes from today back to the Middle ages immediately reveals that our notion of cooking, the system of flavors that seem to us ‘naturally’ desirable, is significantly different from the one that for ages—not only during the Middle ages, but even a few centuries ago as well—people considered good and looked for in foods. Contemporary cooking (in Italy and other european countries) has a primarily analytic character that tends to separate sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and spicy, reserving for each one an autonomous place, both in individual foods and in the order of the meal. This kind of practice is allied with the idea that cooking must respect, insofar as possible, the natural flavor of each food, different and particular from one time to the next, and for that reason keep each one separate from others. But these simple rules do not constitute a universal archetype of cooking that always existed and was always the same. They are the result of a minor revolution that took place in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. . . . Renaissance cooking, medieval cooking, and, going back even further, ancient Roman cooking had evolved a model based principally on the idea of artificiality and the mingling of flavors. The preparation of a single foodstuff, as well as its position within the meal, corresponded to a synthetic rather than an analytic logic: to keep together rather than separate.”

This was not merely a philosophy of cooking. Medieval cooking was “a cuisine of contrast that is in search of balance, the ground zero where distances between flavors are abridged.” Cooking aimed for that balance of contrasts not only for culinary reasons, but for moral and ethical reasons: Diet was embedded in a notion of the soul as well as of the body.

I’m not sure these guys have been watching Chopped.

The Problem and the Solution

Published on by D. G. Hart25 Comments

That would be liberalism in relation to the demands of radical Islam. According to Robert Reilly, if the contest is really between Islam and secular society, freedom without meaning, Islam will win. So he proposes a return to an overtly religious society:

Islamists are not the problem; we are the problem. Were we still a healthy culture, the challenge of Islam in any of its forms would not be major. We need to recover some sense of ourselves based upon our Judeo-Christian faith; and it is our faith that ultimately undergirds the integrity of reason. The crisis of self-confidence in the West is due to the disintegration of belief, which leads to lack of will. It is the sacred which gives meaning to our lives. Evacuate the sacred, and you evacuate the meaning. What happens then?

The regnant multiculturalism in Europe makes it impossible for most of the people there to understand this problem. Perhaps the only thing that European multiculturalism can help explain is why, according to research by the Washington Institute, the Islamic State enjoys more support in Europe than it does in the Middle East.

But would a Judeo-Christian society — whatever that is — be any more appealing to Muslims than a secular one? Maybe a Judeo-Christian society would not welcome the mocking in which Charlie Hebdo engaged. But isn’t Reilly remembering that Christendom warred with Islam?

In fact, Peter Leithart reminds us what blasphemy looked like in a Christian society:

Christendom had a consistent view of blasphemy because it confessed that there is only one God. Blasphemy of this one God was blasphemy indeed; insult to others gods was no blasphemy, because other gods are idols. Other gods and their worshipers were considered the blasphemers, because they dishonored God by worshiping what is not God. Insulting the Christian God was a sin; insulting Allah was considered almost an obligation. Many today disagree, vehemently, but it has the virtue of being consistent because it doesn’t dodge the question of truth.

Leithart agrees sort of with Reilly in regarding liberalism as religiously and morally bankrupt, and so unable to sort of Islam or blasphemy:

Secular liberalism aims and claims to be beyond the possibility of blasphemy. Blasphemy can only exist where there is a sacred to violate; we are supposed to be beyond blasphemy because we have given up on the sacred.

But Leithart also knows that liberalism is the best option available:

For all its contradictions, liberalism is definitely preferable to many, if not most, of the alternatives.

That should be a sober assessment for any believer — evangelical, neo-Calvinist, Roman Catholic — who thinks culture only goes better with cult.

If Priests Created the Secular . . .

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

So reasons Peter Leithart:

Our secular age can be sustained only if the secular has been carefully distinguished from the sacred, and only if the boundary between the two is vigorously, not to say violently, guarded.

But boundary-drawing between the sacred and profane is the work of a priest. It is the sacred act par excellence (cf. among many many texts from many religions, Leviticus 10:10).

So our secular age depends on a sacred gesture.

Which means that our secular age isn’t ultimately a secular age at all. Its secularity is a ruse, a trick of priests.

At least the Enlightenment was right about one thing: You can’t trust priests.

Is discomfort with the secular-sacred distinction the affliction of the shaman?

The Tale of Two Petes

Published on by D. G. Hart16 Comments

Peter Leithart takes Pete Enns to school on reader-response criticism:

Enns is correct to emphasize that the Bible doesn’t function like an owners’ manual. Proverbs more often proposes riddles than it gives simple pious advice. Still, Paul says that the Scripture is useful for training the man of God for “every good work,” so there must be something owner-manualish about the Bible.

These are old arguments, not to be resolved in a blog review. What’s most interesting about Enns’s book is his self-positioning as a defender of Scripture. This isn’t new either. Others have taken up the task of defending the Bible from the fundamentalist hordes. Enns does it cleverly. The Bible doesn’t act the way we want it to, so we have a choice: “either change our expectations to conform to what is actually in the Bible or find some way to force the Bible into our mold” (76). He claims to be doing the former, and his “unsettled faith is a maturing faith” (238). Enns’s critics are pre-classified as immature, fearful abusers of Scripture who want to press the Bible into their own modern molds. At that point, it’s difficult to know how a debate can continue.

If the Mosaic Covenant Was So Gracious . . .

Published on by D. G. Hart131 Comments

Why did the prophets bring so many lawsuits against God’s people? That was the thought I had after reading Peter Leithart:

Covenant lawsuits are embedded in Israel’s covenant-relation with Yahweh. The covenant sets up certain requirements for Israel, and positive and negative sanctions attach to these, blessings for faithfulness and curses for breaking covenant. When Israel goes astray, Yahweh sends his prophets as representatives of the divine court, and they read the charges against Israel, inform them the sentence, and urge them to repentance so that they can (cf. Judges 2:1ff; 6:8).

But then as a good flattener, Leithart portrays Paul as fulfilling the role of an OT prophet:

Paul’s letter is the lawsuit of Jesus against the Galatians, much like the letters to the seven churches in Rev 1-3. It has a structure similar to that of the prophetic lawsuits. Covenant lawsuits often begin with a historical recital of Yahweh’s covenant with Israel and the ways that they have fallen away. Paul begins Galatians with a long review of his relation to the Jerusalem church. Covenant lawsuits specify charges, and Paul brings specific complaints against the Galatians. Prophets warn of coming curses, and Paul pronounces curses against the troublers in Galatia.

Maybe. But where did the New Testament Christians assemble at a mountain and take an oath to do everything God commanded? Sure, the Ottomans’ conquest of the Christian cities in Asia minor could be construed as a form of Christians going into exile. But Turkey was not the promised land any more than Italy was.

Obsessed?

Published on by D. G. Hart86 Comments

Is masturbation okay?

It wasn’t until the early eighteenth century that masturbation became classified as a major evil, and in the event it was not because of its sexual nature but because it was treated as a disease. In a 1712 treatise Onania, a writer identified by Laqueur as John Marten “announced that he had providentially met a pious physician who had found remedies for this hitherto incurable disease. The remedies are expensive, but given the seriousness of the condition, they are worth every penny.” This was followed in 1760 by David Tissot’s L’Onanisme, which “became an instant European literary sensation.” After Tissot, doctors claimed that all sorts of medical complications followed from masturbation: “spinal tuberculosis, epilepsy, pimples, madness, general wasting, and an early death.” It was, for Tissot, more dangerous than smallpox.

Why should the liberated Enlightenment worry about a private pleasure like masturbation? Laqueur argues that there were three complaints: Masturbation is private, based on a fantasy, and creates an insatiable addiction. But he thinks something deeper was going on too. The liberation of the Enlightenment was massive and disorienting that the attack on masturbation was, Laqueur claims, the “centerpiece of a program for policing the imagination, desire, and the self that modernity itself had unleashed.”

Oral sex?

Number two, is it unnatural? This is a tricky one. The male and female genitals are so clearly made for each other that there is a natural fitness or beauty to it. What about oral sex? Now you might jump to the conclusion and say: Nope, that is not natural, but I am slow to go there because of what the Proverbs and the Song of Solomon say about a wife’s breasts. This is kind of an analogy. So consider this. It seems to me nothing is more natural than a baby snuggling in his mother’s arms drinking at her breast. That is what breasts are. They are designed to feed babies. So is there anything physically natural about a husband’s fascination with his wife’s breasts? Well, you might say no. That is not what breasts are for. But Proverbs 5:19 says: Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight. Be intoxicated always with her love. And Song of Solomon 7:7–8 are even more explicit, speaking of the woman: Your stature is like a palm tree and your breasts are like its clusters. I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its fruit. Oh, may your breasts be like clusters of the vine.

Well, even though there is very little anatomical correlation between a man’s hands or his lips and his wife’s breasts, it surely seems to be, quote, natural, in another way, namely built in delight and desire that God in his Word seems to commend for our marital enjoyment. So I ask: Well, might there be similar desires for oral sex or other kinds of sex? So I doubt that we should put a limit on a married couple based on the claim of it being unnatural. That is risky, but that is where I come down on the naturalness of it.

Hedonism anyone?

Another Trend?

Published on by D. G. Hart29 Comments

Is w-w in decline? Has OL been on the cutting edge (while pushing the envelope and kicking the can down the road)? Is this why Peter Leithart left Idaho?

. . . you’ve hit on a pet peeve. I’m ready to delete “worldview” from Christian vocabulary. It’s an especially clunky category for evaluating art. Drama and poetry can’t be reduced to clever ways of communicating ideas, which is what happens in “worldview” analysis.

To get the worldview, you extract ideas about man, society, God, and nature from the plays and organize them into a system; you ignore the poetry and the plot and everything that makes the play a play or the poem a poem. You come to the plays with a preconceived framework that makes it impossible to learn anything from them, much less enjoy them. You produce students who are glib know-it-alls, who don’t need to read the plays carefully because they already know what they think.

C. S. Lewis said that the first moment of any genuine literary criticism is a moment of submission to the work. Worldview analysis never submits; it always tries to dominate the work. As you can see, you’ve struck a nerve. This brings out the curmudgeon in me.

Rather than evaluating Shakespeare (or other poetry, drama, or fiction) with worldview categories, teachers should be teaching students to read. Memorize Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism before teaching another lit class. In short, Harrumph!

Since w-wism is a kind of shibboleth among the co-allies, I wonder what drew Justin Taylor to this.

Political Theologians Pleading Specially

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Why does Peter Leithart find this encouraging, uplifting, or persuasive? Why does the inadequacy of secularism somehow prove the sufficiency of God-drenched conceptions of the world?

The task is not simply to expose the inadequacy of a world without God or to show the collaborative spirit of religious engagement in the common good. It surely must more specifically be to demonstrate the unique power and thrilling wisdom of the logic of God in Christ and to reconceive tired issues in the light of the shape of Christ’s coming. The authority and the credibility of the public theology rest not so much on the theologian’s insight, intelligence, or subtle grasp of complex issues (wondrous as each may be) as on the ability – respectfully, lucidly, and accessibly – to show how Christ redefines human nature, transforms death, and overturns the givens of life; to show what only God can do and only God has done; and more intriguingly, to highlight the way that questions in public life today reflect and recall issues faced by the church in shaping and embodying Christian doctrine.

Who said secularism was going to figure it all out? Who says that Christendom ever did? In fact, if Peter Heather is correct about the appeal of the Roman Empire to Christian Emperors — Constantine, Justinian, and Charlemagne — then the European world even in its most Christian phase was responsible for a lot of senseless war:

. . . a restored empire that captured the essence of the Roman original had become completely impossible by the year 1000. Not only had Islam broken apart ancient Mediterranean unity, and the balance of power in Western Europe shifted decisively north of the Alps, but, still more fundamentally, patterns of development were now much too equal across the broader European landscape. Thanks to this equalization of development, you might say, the scene was set for the thousand subsequent years of fruitless warfare which followed as Europe’s dynasts intermittently struggled to achieve a level of overarching dominance that was in fact impossible. In that sense, it took the nightmare of two world wars in the twentieth century before the European Dream was finally called into existence to try to put a stop to the process of endless armed competition between powers that were always too equal for there to be an outright winner. (The Restoration of Rome, 294-295)

And let’s be clear, these were dynasts with Christian motivations (at least in part — Hegel’s w-w had not come along yet). So why does Leithart think that putting God into the questions surrounding public life will do any good? This time, he thinks, the politicians, inspired by his guy Constantine, will get it right?

And if anyone ever wants to argue for Christendom as an example of politics accomplished Christianly, or that the Christian society secured human flourishing, s/he should merely consider the fundamental dynamic of medieval monarchy — gain control and keep it by taxation, warfare (and don’t forget leaving behind an undisputed heir). According to Heather:

In the small-state world of early medieval Europe, expansionary warfare replaced large-scale taxation as the source of renewable wealth that was necessary to maintaining a powerful central authority in anything but the very shortest of terms. . . . All of which prompts one final question: if expansion was so crucial to the longer-term exercise of central authority, filling the massive gap in royal finance created by the end of taxation, why did later Carolingian monarch allow it to end? . . . A more profitable route into the problem is to consider expansionary warfare in terms of cost-benefit equations which governed it. Expansionary warfare would bring in profits, but also involved costs, not just in financial terms (food, weaponry, etc.), but also in personal terms since some of those participating would certainly die. If you think about it in this way, then the ideal profile of an area ripe for expansion is easy enough to construct: it needs to be economically developed enough to offer a satisfying level of reward both in terms of moveable booty and potential land-grabbing, but militarily not so well organized that too many of your expeditionary army, on average, are going to die winning access to the prize. . . . On every corner of the frontier, the cost-benefit equation was starting to deliver a negative answer, either because the enemy was too formidable (Spain), or because the likely benefits were not that great (the Balkans), or some combination of the two (southern Italy and the Southern Elbe region). (288-90)

When you think about empire and government in those terms, the modern secular nation-state surely does seem to have its advantages. That’s not because it doesn’t go to war or because it’s run by a bunch of virtucrats. Instead, say what you will about capitalism and its appeal to baser human motivations, it does generate the kind of internal wealth that many times prevents nation-states from having to conquer another people who will pay the government’s bills. Not to mention that constitutionalism and enumerated powers are a much better way of gaining consent than intimidation by force (cheaper too).

Why the Bible Cuts Both Ways — two-edged sword and all that

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Peter Leithart’s comments on Eran Shalev’s American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War reminded me of what I learned from Sunday’s sermon (a week ago) from II Chronicles 36, the culmination of Judah’s fall from grace, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the beginning of the people of God’s status as refugees (which continues). This narrative includes the hard-to-spin wrinkle of Zedekiah, Judah’s king, rebelling against a pagan and foreign king, Nebuchadnezzar, a figure whom the Israelites would normally have regarded as a tyrant and against whom legitimately rebelled. But when Zedekiah doesn’t submit to Nebuchadnezzar, the writer likens Judah’s king to Pharoah — the stiffnecked oppressor who held the Israelites in slavery:

Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he began to reign, and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem. He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD his God. He did not humble himself before Jeremiah the prophet, who spoke from the mouth of the LORD. He also rebelled against King Nebuchadnezzar, who had made him swear by God. He stiffened his neck and hardened his heart against turning to the LORD, the God of Israel. All the officers of the priests and the people likewise were exceedingly unfaithful, following all the abominations of the nations. And they polluted the house of the LORD that he had made holy in Jerusalem. (2 Chronicles 36:11-14 ESV)

This is the sort of narrative that folks like John of Salisbury or Thomas Aquinas may have cited to show that tyranny was not always bad. Well, to be precise, it was bad in the sense of not being the way things were supposed to be. But not bad in the sense that this was a form of rule that God was using to punish his people.

And yet, the American colonists, led by Calvinists as we keep hearing, never stopped to consider whether King George was their Nebuchadnezzar, the Lord’s appointed ruler to mete out punishment for disobedience and infidelity. According to Leithart (following Shalev):

During the Revolution, writers and preachers turned to the historical books of the Hebrew Bible to fill out ancient Roman analyses of political corruption. George III was Rehoboam, Solomon’s son whose high taxes divided Israel, or Ahab, who seized the vineyard of innocent Naboth. The charges against King George were sometimes moderated by reference to the book of Esther: The hapless king was manipulated by Haman-like advisors who turned him against the children of the land of the Virgin. Patriots were Mordecais or Maccabees, while loyalists were “sons of Meroz,” a Hebrew town cursed because its inhabitants refused to follow Deborah and Barak into battle. Colonial writers saw links with Roman history: Washington was Cincinnatus. But Washington was also Gideon, the judge who delivered Israel and very deliberately refused an offer of kingship.

Of course, the American rebels didn’t have a prophet to tell them what to think about King George the way that Zedekiah had Jeremiah to whisper advice or shout warning. And that’s the point. Without divine revelation, how do you interpret any ruler or set of events (or culture or city or television series) as in accord with or against divine will? (And when will the students of American politics who seem to enjoy pointing out the biblical context for political debates also point out that such appeals to holy writ could very well be wrong and an abuse of Scripture?)

Should Federal Visionaries Model the Protestant Future?

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Peter Leithart clarifies some of the points he made about Christian unity in the discussion of Protestantism’s future at Biola:

One key difference between us is this: Carl thinks that unity is a “desirable” goal. I think that’s far too weak a way to capture the New Testament’s teaching. Unity is an evangelical demand. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say it is the evangelical demand.

When Paul discovered that Peter refused table fellowship with Gentiles, he didn’t say, “Come, Peter. Unity is desirable. Let’s hope that someday we can share a table. I doubt it, but we can desire it.” Paul’s words, as reported by himself, were: “I saw that they [Peter and the rest] were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel” (Galatians 2:14).

I don’t mean to get personal, but if unity is imperative, why did Leithart leave Idaho for Alabama? Why not maintain the unity that had existed at New St. Andrews and the churches there? And what’s up with the Davenant Trust, the institutional affiliation of Peter Escalante, the moderator at the Biola event? I can’t figure out where Davenant Trust is (from the website), but apparently Escalante works in California.

I understand that Leithart doesn’t necessarily mean organizational unity. But in the United States can union mean anything but living in a place with fixed borders under one government? So why are Federal Visionaries all over the map?