Leithart Peter Quotes & Sayings

Pray, and then start looking for answers. Faithful prayer leads to expectant living. Pray for the Spirit, and wait to see the Spirit work all around you. Faithful prayer leads to Spiritual living. Pray, and know that whatever God brings is exactly the fish and bread and eggs you need. Prayer in faith leads to thankful living. Pray that your Father would be with you, protect you, guide you, and put away timidity and fear and anxiety. Prayer leads to bold, fearless living. — Peter Leithart

Dancing is forbidden to Christians. Isn't it suggestive that the word ballet comes from the Greek ballo, which is also the origin of diabolos, "devil"?8 — Peter J. Leithart

I rock because sometimes I'm scared and that's alright. I rock because I'm not afraid to cry. I rock because I'm loved and I'm able to love. I rock ... I rock. — Anika Noni Rose

The Triune God is in the world, nearer to us than we are to ourselves, yet the world is also encompassed by his loving presence. He does have the whole world in his hands, even while he inhabits the whole world. For Christians, being saved means being caught up into this communion, indwelled by God and indwelling in him, and being opened up so that other people have room in us and we in them. — Peter J. Leithart

This is your Father's world. He has your back, He goes before you, He is the rock beneath you and your heavenly Father above. This is your Father's world, and He has created this wide world is as a playground for His children. — Peter Leithart

Pray knowing that you pray to your heavenly Father. Pray in confidence that when you ask you will receive; when you seek you will find; when you knock it will be opened. Pray knowing that you pray to a God who doesn't give stones or serpents to his kids. Believe Jesus, and pray accordingly. — Peter Leithart

Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold. — Ada Louise Huxtable

Austen is a moralist, but, as John Lauber has put it, she is not a "punitive" moralist. Sometimes her villains receive no more serious punishment than to achieve their desires. Often that is punishment enough. — Peter J. Leithart

Baptism is one of those more effective rites that come in with the new covenant. The fact that baptism takes the place of the multiple, complicated cleansing rites of stoicheic order is itself a sign that salvation has come to the world. And the fact that baptism does the miraculous work of binding diverse flesh into one body means that baptism is one of the rites that effects the social salvation of humanity. — Peter Leithart

The Bible gives no hint that a Christian "belief system" might be isolated from the life of the Church, subjected to scientific analysis, and have its truth compared with competing "belief systems". — Peter Leithart

I believe we find imaginative satisfaction in stories that end with weddings because we live in a world that will end with a wedding. The Bible tells the story of history, a story that is mysteriously 'built into' the structure of our minds and practices, so that even writers who resist this story cannot help but leave traces of it - faint and distorted as they may be - on every page. — Peter J. Leithart

A justified person dies and rises in Christ, and so is delivered from sin, death and domination of flesh. Justification is, to introduce my neologism, a "deliverdict," a forensic act, a judicial verdict that in its very forensic character is an act of deliverance. It is a favorable judgement in the form of resurrection. — Peter Leithart

Anyone can discern the evils of the factory system or the Terror.
But it takes considerable wisdom to discern the evils embedded in the staccato blather of a seventeen-year-old girl. — Peter J. Leithart

The Bible is useful because it opens our eyes, and because it's highly impractical to walk through life with our eyes closed. — Peter J. Leithart

We don't welcome the naked and hungry so they can be naked and hungry in our company. We clothe and feed. Hospitality is not toleration but transformation. — Peter Leithart

Comedy mocks the vanity of visions of rational control. The person who can joke amidst a confrontation with evil, like the quick-witted Spider-Man, must be reconciled to the permanent imperfections of a corrupted world populated by fallen creatures. — Peter Leithart

The cross is the crux, the crossroads, the twisted knot at the center of reality, to which all previous history leads and from which all subsequent history flows. By it we know all reality is cruciform - the love of God, the shape of creation, the labyrinth of human history. — Peter J. Leithart

For Mary, the world is something to be mastered, manipulated, and made; for Fanny, the world is a gift to be received with thanksgiving. Fanny is the eucharistic heroine, giving thanks in all times and places. — Peter J. Leithart

It is a strange story, the story of Jesus. To the Jews, it is not the story of Israel's redemption but some odd detour. For Christians, though, the story of Jesus is the final chapter of the story of Israel. For Christians, all that Israel hopes for - redemption from enemies, forgiveness of sins, triumph and exaltation, a restoration of Eden, the conversion of the nations, the earth filled with the glory of Israel's God - all of it comes to pass through Jesus. Not through the sword of Zealots, or the rigid purity of the Pharisees, or the political compromises of the Sadducees, or the withdrawal of the Essenes. Israel's story is carried to its conclusion by a different sort of Jew entirely, a different sort of holiness, a different story-line, a story-line of compassion, service, suffering, death. And, over all and transforming all, resurrection. For Jesus is risen. He is risen indeed. — Peter J. Leithart

Worship is Political Science 101.
In every worship service, the Christian ekklesia is renewed in her unique story and language, her unique political experience and vocation. Every worship service is a challenge to Caesar, because every Lord's Day we bow to a Man on the throne of heaven, to whom even great Caesar must bow. O'Donovan claims that all political order rests on a people's homage to authority, which is to say, on an act of worship. Every Lord's Day, the Church is reconstituted as a polity whose obedience is owed to Christ, and we are taught to name Jesus as King of kings and Lord of lords. — Peter J. Leithart

Christianity is the heresy of heresies, the underlying cause of the weakness, lethargy, sickness, and failure of the modern church. — Peter J. Leithart

Context enables us to determine which of several meanings is in play in a particular text. The verb in "I see" means something quite different if uttered by a formerly blind man healed with spittle and dust, by a student who has just received an extended explanation of a difficult mathematical theorem, or by a skeptical wife whose husband offers a lame explanation for the lipstick on his collar. In the first context, see refers to physical sight, while in the latter two it refers to understanding, and in the last it could hardly be said without a heap of sarcasm. — Peter J. Leithart

Scorecards are common in the political process, but they are inappropriate in the judicial process. The most important tools in the judicial confirmation process are not litmus paper and a calculator. — Orrin Hatch

Before we can progress in providing answers ... we have to repent of our questions. — Peter J. Leithart

Jesus keeps the Sabbath with an eye to the "weightier matters of the law," which are justice, mercy, and truth. Jesus keeps the Sabbath as an adult. Children are very worried about keeping the rules, and forcing other people to keep the rules. But children might keep rules so rigidly that they actually violate the rules. That's how the Pharisees keep the law. They are childish law keepers. Jesus is a mature law-keeper, and He calls His disciples to keep the law in the same way. — Peter J. Leithart

How is it that time can be elastic? Sometimes years seem to go by while you're looking the other way, and sometimes-when you most long for it to pass-life-times can stretch from a few hours — Polly Johnson

Whenever God gives a miracle child to an old couple, it is a sign that He is beginning something new. An old couple having their first child means a new life. But a virgin who conceives must mark the beginning of a new creation. — Peter J. Leithart

Occasionally projects just take off unexpectedly, sometimes you can work away at sketches and ideas for years before they are published. There are a number of authors I would be eager to illustrate. — John Howe

The Bible never mentions Christianity. It does not preach Christianity, nor does it encourage us to preach Christianity. Paul did not preach Christianity, nor did any of the other apostles. During centuries when the Church was strong and vibrant, she did not preach Christianity either. Christianity, like Judaism and "Yahwism", is an invention of biblical scholars, theologians, and politicians, and one of its chief effects is to keep Christians and the Church in their proper marginal place. The Bible speaks of Christians and of the Church, but Christianity is gnostic, and the Church firmly rejected gnosticism from her earliest days. — Peter J. Leithart

Pastors and Bible teachers go about their work in communal settings, where they listen to as well as deliver sermons, hear as well as speak, and gain biblical insights from their parishioners as much as they pass them on. — Peter J. Leithart

Literature in the West arose from liturgy. — Peter J. Leithart

A Christian who is willing to take up arms against another Christian is a Christian who has traded in his membership in the post-Babel communion of saints for membership in a nation governed by refurbished stoicheic values. They have traded in their loyalty to the temple of the Spirit for loyalty to the flesh. Christians who make war against other Christians are Galatians, bewitched by the lure of patriotism, which is simply the lure of flesh. They are no longer in the ranks of the Spirit. — Peter Leithart