Peter J. Leithart - Traces of the Trinity: Signs of God in Creation and Human Experience

. See John Frame, Doctrine of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2002), appendix A, for a list of over one hundred triads that may illumine or reflect the reality of the Trinity.

. I have in mind Jrgen Moltmann, specifically.

. Colin Gunton, Robert Jenson, John Milbank, and John Zizioulas have been the most formative for me.

Chapter 1 Outside In, Inside Out

. This is one of Descartess most important mistakes. I am not a seeing, experiencing thing inside the box of my body. Its my body doing the seeing and experiencing. Once we correct Descartes there, we have to re-envisage everything else too.

. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1962), 82, quoted in James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013), 44.

. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , xixii, quoted in Smith, Imagining the Kingdom , 42. Martin Heidegger coined his own German term to describe what we actually are. Human beings are Dasein , which means Being-there. We are beings, but if we stop with that, we can easily think of ourselves as beings that float above the world or hide outside the world, or who can survey the world from a safe mental perch somewhere. We are not merely beings but beings who are always there , always somewhere, and we are surrounded by objects that already have their uses, uses we have to learn.

or defecating. Tom Rawstorne, The Man Who Says He Hasnt Eaten or Drunk for 70 Years: Why Are Eminent Doctors Taking Him Seriously?, Mail Online , May 8, 2010, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1274779/The-man-says-eaten-drunk-70-years-Why-eminent-doctors-taking-seriously.html. Jani claims that he received his ability to live without normal sustenance from his devotion to the Hindu goddess Amba.

. Rupert Sheldrake has explored alternative accounts of sight in The Sense of Being Stared At (New York: Random House, 2004). He claims that vision involves projections that extend beyond the brain and the body: Projection takes place through perceptual fields, extending out beyond the brain, connecting the seeing animal with that which is seen. Vision is rooted in the activity of the brain, but is not confined to the inside of the head. Like magnetic fields, minds create perceptual fields (4243). If Sheldrake is correct, then the thesis of this chapter is further strengthened.

. Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Random House, 2011), 10.

. Philip Jenkins, Laying Down the Sword: Why We Cant Ignore the Bibles Violent Verses (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2012), 1617. See Sergio Della Sala, ed., Forgetting (New York: Psychology Press, 2010); Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Delete (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

. Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion (London: Coronet Books, 2012), 59.

. Ibid., 6162.

. Karl Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism (London: Routledge, 1984), quoted in Sheldrake, Science Delusion , 6061.

. Kelly Cline, Solid Objects Are Mostly Empty Space, Independent Record , June 6, 2012, http://helenair.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/solid-objects-are-mostly-empty-space/article_32b70fa2-af9f-11e1-8062-001a4bcf887a.html .

. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Knopf, 1991), 17.

. Bernard DEspagnat, The Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (Reading, MA: Benjamin, 1976), 286, quoted in Sheldrake, Science Delusion , 295.

. Thats not as spooky as it sounds. An electron is only detectable if we can get a photon to interact with it. But that photon changes the way the electron is moving. Because of our method of measurement, measurements affect the thing being measured when the thing is as tiny as an electron.

. As Heidegger well knew, this insight was really a recovery of some of the central insights of ancient thought. Though Heidegger tended to look all the way back to the pre-Socratics, much of what he says about things has roots in Aristotle. For Aristotle, the final cause or purpose was one of the causes that made a thing what it is. In fact, for Aristotle, the final cause is the first cause: before you determine the materials or shape of a building, you consider what it will be used for. The final cause is a kind of ready-to-hand causation.

. This is the illustration that Philipp W. Rosemann uses to explain the fundamental premises of Thomistic metaphysics. See Omne ens est aliquid: Introduction la lecture du systeme philosophique de saint Thomas d Aquin (Louvain: Peeters, 1996), 49.

Chapter 2 Like Father, Like Son

. J. H. van den Berg, A Different Existence (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1972), quoted in Richard Stivers, Shades of Loneliness: Pathologies of a Technological Society (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 2.

. The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann , 19731983 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 2000).

. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13. Why cant human beings just be sociable? Bees and ants do it, and they dont have the benefit of speech that can signify to another what he thinks expedient for the common benefit. Humans cant just get along, Hobbes thinks, for several reasons: because we compete with one another for honor; because a bees private interest is identical to its public interest; because ants lack reason and thus never protest against bad government; because, lacking speech, bees and ants also lack the capacity for deception; because animals are happy when at ease while men are most troublesome when comfortable. Above all, humans cant be like the bees and ants because the agreement of these creatures is natural; that of man is by covenant only, which is artificial (ibid., 17).