The best altar call

Peter J Leithart writes: "Detached from the Eucharistic liturgy, preaching is at sea. Preachers  announce the gospel and call our people to faith. We also want to give them something to do. ... The best altar call is . . . well, an altar call – a call to the altar-table of Jesus, where He offers Himself to us by His Spirit through bread and wine. Liturgical biblical theology has a ready-made application: “Do this!” This is clearly not a meritorious doing, because the command is an order to receive a gift."

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2015/11/the-altar-call

The Enlightenment Bible

Peter J Leithart writes: "The fragmenting methods that created the Enlightenment Bible are the same tools used to study it. ... On this point, the Church unfortunately accommodated to the trends of the times. Seminaries institutionalize the Bible’s fragmentation by separating faculties into departments of Old and New Testament. Within the Church, “scientific” exegesis has often been regarded as the gold standard of serious biblical scholarship, and modern Christians are often as contemptuous of premodern allegory, figural exegesis, and typology as your neighborhood philosophe. The Church’s disciplines of reading should suit our convictions about the Bible’s unity. And so, to the refusal of the Enlightenment Bible, we must add another refusal: a refusal of the Enlightenment’s habits of reading."

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/11/enlightenment-bible-church-bible