Quotes from Peter Leithart

As Eusebius recounted the story, Constantine seemed to believe there was a basic incompatibility between being an emperor and being a Christian, between court and church, warfare and prayer, the purple and the white. It would be an ironic conclusion: Constantine, the first anti-Constantinian. Constantine the Yoderian

The promise of the new covenant is not that we're liberated from God's word, but that we're liberated to keep it.

We are images of God. When we venerate images, we're not merely exchanging the glory of God for the glory of creation. We give up our own glory. We're alienated from our own vocation.

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.

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.

Our desires are to mature, so that our souls, brought to life by the Spirit, move us to pursue real treasure and eternal glory with passion.

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.

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".

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.

Before we can progress in providing answers . . . we have to repent of our questions.

Literature in the West arose from liturgy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.