St. Boniface House

Pastor Helsel shares some interesting insights here.

I’ve finally been able to pick up my copy of Peter Leithart’s Deep Comedy and I am enjoying it immensely.  The first chapter outlines the different threads of the pagan view of the course of history as a cyclical series of four (or five) ages.  Each age is named after a metal, and in the succession of ages the names are of metals that are increasingly less valuable (gold, silver, bronze, iron–some accounts of this myth include an “Age of Heroes” between bronze and iron). Accordingly, each age is a diminished version of the one preceeding it.  Leithart’s argument is that the ancient pagan view of history was entirely pessimistic.  In fact, the most optimistic perspective to be found in the classical mythology is that presented by Virgil, who “comes closer than any in the classical world…to a conception of an eschatological resolution to history” (pg. 12).  But even Virgil cannot do better than to see history return to the “golden age”, and thus the most hopeful view the ancient world has to offer cannot approximate the glorious advance of history from Eden to the New Jerusalem, from garden to garden-city. (more…)

Doug Wilson recently noted in his blog that “various liberals are starting to emerge with “gotcha!” observations on the source of the disaster [Hurricane Katrina]– global warming, the U.S. backing out of the Kyoto treaty…RFK, Jr. wrote that Mississippi governor Haley Barbour has been reaping the whirlwind because of his earlier role in arguing for President Bush’s energy policy over against environmental policy” and argued that the time for such concerns are after the rescue efforts have been completed. He’s exactly right, of course. I would bet the farm, though, that the people who are making these sorts of ridiculous claims now are the same ones who saw a red mist when Jerry Falwell and others attributed the 9/11 catastrophe to God’s judgment on certain moral trends in America. In the end, then, what is apparent is that they were not objecting to the claim that “God judges wickedness” nor even “God is judging a particular kind of wickedness” but that they were objecting to that God judging that wickedness. The difference lies in devotion to a different god who has different moral concerns. But it is Yahweh, not the gods of the nations, who rides the clouds (see Deut.33:26, Isa. 19:1; Ps. 68).