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Category Archive: Theology

Derrida the theologian - November 15, 2007
In a 1997 review in First Things, Andrew McKenna suggests that Derrida's most important contribution might ultimately be to deconstruct philosophy so thoroughly that one is left only with theology: "the Sermon on the Mount performs a critique of difference...

Calvin, Milbank, and Gifts - November 14, 2007
J. Todd Billings compares Milbank's theology of gift with Calvin's theology of grace in a 2005 article from Modern Theology. He focuses attention on Milbank's criticism that the Reformation put such emphasis on the unilateral character of grace and so...

Engaging Barth - November 12, 2007
Barth's influence continues to grow, among evangelicals no less than others. David Gibson and Daniel Strange have edited a new book, Engaging With Barth (IVP, UK), that collects critical essays on Barth's theology. The publicity information says, "This volume engages...

Augustine on the web - November 08, 2007
For anyone looking for Latin texts of Augustine on the web, the most complete site I've been able to find is: www.augustinus.it/index2.htm. Also, check out J.J. O'Donnell's Confessions commentary at ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/augustine.html....

Exhortation - November 04, 2007
There is no baptism today, but this is our first service in some time without one. We have a lot of small children in this congregation, and that is a great joy and blessing. It is also a great challenge....

Exhortation - October 21, 2007
There are no tricks to prayer. The crucial thing is not the method we use or the pattern we follow. The crucial thing is confidence in the God to whom we pray. Who is that God? He is the eternal...

Sketch of Contemporary Theology - September 19, 2007
This is a partial, prejudiced, personal list of some of things going on in theology today. It's very much limited by my own knowledge and interests. It is in no particular order. I. Theology: Movements and Trends. A. Political theology...

Federal Vision Discussion - September 17, 2007
Over at the De Regno Christi web site (http://deregnochristi.org), we're starting a discussion of the Federal Vision today. Participants include Doug Wilson, Richard Lints, John Muether, Daryl Hart, and me....

Christianity and Barthianism - September 12, 2007
As noted in a post earlier his week, Barth sees Kant's philosophical program as an opening for the biblical theologian to do his own thing on his own basis by his own methods, without paying much of any attention to...

Christ or Nihil - September 12, 2007
Milbank closes a superb article on the "radical pietists" (Hamann and Jacobi) with this paragraph: "Because [the radical pietists] point theology to a radical orthodoxy they also show how theology can outwit nihilism. Not by seeking to reinstate reason, as...

Abraham - September 12, 2007
Kant viewed Judaism as a narrow, particular, hostile political entity. The fact that God promised that He would bless the nations through Abraham seems not to have registered with Kant. Kant's treatment of Judaism has central importance in his construction...

Barth on post-Kantian Theology - September 11, 2007
Barth's includes an extensive treatment of Kant in his history of 19th century Protestant theology. According to Barth, Kant represents the 18th-century's coming to self-consciousness. He saw both the possibilities and the limits of the Enlightenment's obsessions with reason. He...

Pagan West - September 06, 2007
My article on "re-paganizing the West" is up on the First Things web site: http://www.firstthings.com....

Solomon Among the Postmoderns - September 06, 2007
You'll notice to the right that my book on postmodernism is due out early next year. In it, I use some of the images and categories of Ecclesiastes to explore some themes of postmodernism - specifically, language, the self, and...

Cosmological and ontological - September 03, 2007
Nancey Murphy summarizes Kant's argument that the cosmological argument reduces to the ontological in this way: "Suppose we can argue to the necessary existence of some x by showing that its existence is a necessary condition for the existence of...

Music, Time, and Augustine - August 30, 2007
One of the best discussions of Augustine's views on time comes from Jeremy Begbie's Theology, Music, and Time (ch. 3). Following Ricoeur's discussion, Begbie claims that Augustine's distentio "is conceived as the three-fold present, and the threefold present as distentio....

Escaping time - August 30, 2007
John Rist offers some important insights into Augustine's view of time. He notes, as many commentators do, that Augustine is not aiming to provide a definition of time but to answer the question of how time can be measured. The...

Faith and Reason - August 29, 2007
For centuries, Christians have posed the dilemma of Christian theology as a problem of faith v. reason. That's a non-starter, a concession of defeat, for it assumes that there can be such a thing as a faith-free rationality. But there...

Bible and world - August 21, 2007
Robert Wilken emphasizes the biblically-centered character of early Christian preaching and thought: "Not only in sermons but also in theological works, in letters, and in spiritual writings the church fathers display an enviable verbal command of large sections of the...

Barth and Dogmatics - August 16, 2007
Dogmatics, according to Barth (CD, I, 1), is the correction, clarification, and criticism of church proclamation by measuring proclamation against the Word of God in the Bible. Dogmatics is a second-order form of thought and reflection. It is not the...

Theology's false humility - August 15, 2007
I've read this paragraph from the introduction to Milbank's Theology and Social Theory dozens of times, but it's still thrilling. "The pathos of modern theology is its false humility. For theology, this must be a fatal disease, because once theology...

Modernity's protective shield - August 15, 2007
If "we have never been modern," why do we all say we have? Why do we say we're living in an iron cage, that the world has been secularized and disenchanted, that religion has passed its sell-by date? Perhaps we...

Calvin and the Goodness of God - August 03, 2007
The popular picture of Calvin suggests that he was a theologian of truth, and that he subordinates God's goodness and beauty fairly radically to His truthfulness. In his recent Notre Dame Press book on Calvin's theology of Word and Image,...

The enemy death - July 17, 2007
Death is an enemy of life in the obvious sense that it brings an individual's life to an end. But it's an enemy of life in a broader sense to. Death interrupts life, everyone's life, life in the broadest sense....

New Christendom? - July 17, 2007
Bediako, Mbiti, and Lamin Sanneh are all African theologians who reject Christendom. By "Christendom" they mean a system where the Christianity is domesticated and put into the service of state or imperial interests. While this has been a reality within...

Theology of Culture - July 17, 2007
Kwame Bediako summarizes the trends of African theology under two headings: liberation and study of indigenous religions. He focuses on the latter, emphasizing that this study is a theological enterprise, and not simply cultural anthropology. He also suggests that this...

Re-Evangelizing the West - July 13, 2007
Bediako says that Christianity has always had more success evangelizing primal religious areas than "advanced" religions like Buddhism or Hinduism or Islam. Or modern Western secularism. Perhaps the West needs to be re-primitivized in order to be re-evangelized. Or perhaps...

Reasonable Christianity - July 11, 2007
Barth argues that 18th-century rational theology was rooted in prior commitments to peaceable citizenship and morality. The dynamic goes something like this: Christianity is interpreted pragmatically - it's about the transformation of human life; but it doesn't work - human...

Practical preaching - July 11, 2007
In his history of Protestant theology in the 19th century, Barth lists some of the sermon topics of one Traugott Gunther Roller of Schonfels in Kur-Saxony: Fourth Sunday after Epiphany: The Duties of a Christian Congregation saved from the Grave...

Whose questions? - July 11, 2007
Bediako neatly describes the dualism that results when the church attempts to apply the questions and answers of European or American Christianity to Africa without addressing the questions of Africans themselves. He quotes John Taylor's pointed question: "if Christ were...

Against Theology - July 11, 2007
Bediako criticizes other African theologians who claim that there is no African theological tradition. There is, he admits, not much if we're looking for school theology. But focusing on that lack misses the real action - the "grassroots" theology expressed...

Good/evil or finite/infinite - July 10, 2007
What Milbank describes as "postmodern Kantianism" (in Zizek, Nancy, and others) wants to take evil seriously, which means "positively." They do not think Augustine's theory adequately accounts for modern evil, complaining that the Augustinian account's weakness left Europe open to...

Privatio boni - July 10, 2007
Milbank makes a couple of interesting points regarding the import of an Augustinian view of evil. 1) Augustine's view assumes the goodness of matter, in fact the goodness of all being. This, Milbank claims, seems to excuse evil - it's...

Privatio boni and banal evil - July 10, 2007
In the view of many, the Holocaust belied the Augustinian description of evil as the privation of good. Something much more insidiously positive was at work in the death camps. Hannah Arendt, however, seems to confirm the Augustinian perspective in...

Eschatological Economy - July 04, 2007
At a quick glance, Douglas H. Knight's The Eschatological Economy (Eerdmans, 2006) looks very good. Some of Knight's other work has been on John Zizioulas, the Orthodox Trinitarian theologian, and this book includes discussions of Zizioulasian themes like Trinity, personhood,...

Causa sui, 2 - July 02, 2007
As Caputo explains it, the Cartesian description of God as causa sui entails an important re-definition of cause. The sort of redefinition is important. Modernity prides itself on its embrace of movement and dynamism, and portrays the pre-modern world as...

Causa sui - July 02, 2007
Jean-Luc Marion sees a fateful change in theology proper when Descartes describes God as "causa sui" rather than as "uncaused cause" (which was the scholastic description). What's the deal? Marion says that talking about a self-caused God makes no sense....

Empty minds - June 25, 2007
Aquinas wrote: "If the teacher determines the question by appeal to authorities only, the student will be convinced that the thing is so, but will have acquired no knowledge or understanding, and he will go away with an empty mind."...

PCA on the cross - June 22, 2007
According to Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's cross of reality, individuals are always stretched out on a cross, in four directions - to the past and to the future, to the inside and to the outside. Growth and maturity come when we endure...

Catholicity - June 22, 2007
Among other things, the Federal Vision has been an effort to articulate a Reformed catholicity, and the fight in the PCA is in part a fight between catholicity and sectarianism. The massive vote at GA against the Federal Vision was,...

Reading list - June 22, 2007
I confess. I have read a good bit of NT Wright, and appreciate much of what he has to say. His books on Jesus opened the gospels for me in ways that nothing else did. Wright, for those who don't...

Hearing the "Accused" - June 16, 2007
The emperor invited Luther to speak for himself at the Diet of Worms. By that time, the Pope had already had a stack of Luther's writings, enough to identify 41 errors that he wanted Luther to retract. Eck knew full...

Brain Drain - June 15, 2007
Imagine you're a sharp young NT scholar of Reformed conviction, who wants to engage the latest NT scholarship fairly, critically, and appreciatively where appropriate. Imagine you're a theologian of Reformed inclinations who's looking for a place to do creative theological...

Letter to the Stated Clerk - June 14, 2007
This is a copy of a letter I sent to the stated clerk of my Presbytery this morning. To the Stated Clerk: I don't know if I'm technically required to send this letter, but following the GA's vote on the...

Theological debate in the PCA - June 14, 2007
It's long been a frustration that there are few fora for theological discussion and debate in the PCA. Presbyteries sometimes devote time to such discussion, but that's too rare. And GA is simply not a place where theological debate can...

Dubious innovators - June 14, 2007
During the PCA debate on the Federal Vision, PCA minister David Coffin dismissed NT Wright's supposed claims to have discovered the gospel that had been hidden for centuries. Coffin found the claim dubious. I am dubious that Wright actually makes...

FV and the PCA Constitution - June 12, 2007
Jordan Mark Siverd, Esq., has provided a very careful constitutional evaluation of the FV Study Committee here: http://necdumvidemus.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/fv-memo-final.pdf...

Ten Prayers - June 08, 2007
It's hard to write about prayer without being gimmicky or excessively pious. In his recent book, Ten Prayers God Always Says Yes To (Doubleday), Anthony DeStefano, author of the best-selling, A Travel Guide to Heaven, avoids these pitfalls. Mostly. The...

Graduation address - June 02, 2007
It's customary on an occasion such as this to extol the accomplishments of the graduating seniors, commend students and teachers for a job well done, and encourage you with a stirring speech about the open future that lies before you....

Rain from a Rainless Sky - May 24, 2007
Brendan O'Donnell's Rain from a Rainless Sky (Bright Rock Press, 2006) is a theological meditation on sagebrush. Writing in understated prose as stark as the landscapes where sagebrush thrives, O'Donnell weaves together a biblical theology of trees and weeds, reflections...

His Voice - May 18, 2007
When in distress or confusion, literate medieval Christians would sometimes let the Bible drop open, and took guidance and comfort the first passage their eye alighted on. This could be superstitious, of course. But it could also come from a...

Theological imagination - May 15, 2007
One of my recurring frustrations with recent debates in the Reformed world is a widespread failure of theological imagination. Too many seem to operate on the assumption that we have everything already figured out; we have all possible categories and...

The RCUS and me - May 15, 2007
Like several other Reformed denominations, the RCUS has a study committee examining the Federal Vision theology, particularly as it pertains to justification, and part of that report focuses on my article, "Judge Me, O God." I have a few comments...

Theology as prayer - April 27, 2007
If all theology is theology proper, all theology is also prayer. Because we are never merely speaking "about" God....

Prayer for unbelief - April 20, 2007
Bonaventure urges the reader of his Itinerarium to pray for various forms of unbelief: "so that he not believe that reading is sufficient without unction, speculation without devotion, investigation without wonder, observation without joy, work without piety, knowledge without love,...

Place of theology - April 11, 2007
Roch Kereszty asks why, if "Scriptural formulas are the most accurate and the best suited for expressing christological doctrine," we need "theological speculation." He answers that theology exists to clarify and explain the Bible: "Systematic theologians . . . will...

Letter, Spirit, and Progress - April 11, 2007
Interpreting the Psalmist's cry for understanding, Luther discusses the need for understanding to grow over time: "The Psalmist prays for an understanding against the mere letter,for the Spirit is understanding. For as the years have passed, so has the relationship...

Exhortation, Fifth Sunday of Lent - March 25, 2007
The family is not a redemptive institution. It is a fallen institution in need of redemption. Through the power of the Word and Spirit, God does redeem families. Through the Spirit, marriages can begin to reflect the marriage of Christ...

Exhortation, Second Sunday of Lent - March 04, 2007
Churches, families, and nations have memories, just as much as individuals. But while individual memory tends to be more or less automatic unless there is some physiological problem, group memories need to be cultivated. Over the course of generations, groups...

Predestination and Logic - February 26, 2007
Rosenstock-Huessy does not especially like Calvin's doctrine of double predestination, but at the same time he argues that the doctrine preserves necessary within Calvin's theology. (This from an essay entitled "Generations of Faith," in Volume 1 of his Collected Papers.)...

Wedding Sermon - February 24, 2007
A few minutes ago, you each answered a question I posed to you. I asked you if you would take her as your wife, and whether you would pledge yourself to her as her husband. I asked you whether you...

Eschatological meaning - February 24, 2007
Thanks to my student Larson Hicks for the substance of this post. Until a command is fully carried out, we don't have a complete grasp of what the command means or requires of us. "Take Normandy Beach," solider are told,...

Who Defines "Reformed"? - February 21, 2007
In a couple of posts over the last several weeks, I've tried to analyze the "Federal Vision" from a variety of angles - as an "identity crisis" provoked by the FV tendency to reach outside the Reformed tradition for inspiration,...

Law as gospel - February 15, 2007
I recently saw the film, The End of the Spear, the story of Nate Saint and Jim Eliot's mission to Ecuador. After the tribe spears the missionaries, one of the women from the tribe, who had left to live with...

Systems and Sub-systems - February 14, 2007
A few days ago, I suggested that the Federal Vision controversy in the Reformed churches is a "Presbyterian identity crisis." But I don't want to minimize the theological dimension of this debate. The issue is how to express the real...

Word and faith - February 13, 2007
Faith is inherent in human life because we live in response to language. Soldiers charge into the fray on orders from a general they trust. If they knew exactly what was ahead, their charge wouldn't be an act of faith....

Third term - February 13, 2007
Lori Branch comments that the "cultural formations of western Christianity" grew out of "binary, Protestant-Catholic debates." But this binarism is disrupted by the entry of a third, Eastern Orthodoxy. When the church history of the last century is written, the...

Presbyterian identity crisis - February 13, 2007
What is the "Federal Vision" or "Auburn Avenue" dispute about? Partly, it's about theology. I believe the core dispute has to do with nature and importance of what Reformed theologians call the "visible church," the universal body of believers organized...

Taking and Partaking - February 06, 2007
"Partake" is a fuzzily Platonic word, but we pierce the fuzziness a bit by contrasting "partake" to "take." When we "take" something, it's no longer with the one we took it from; it's with us. Tim Duncan might take a...

Jews and Gentiles - January 25, 2007
The extension of rights to the Jews was one of the great achievements of the French Revolution, and Rosenstock-Huessy moves from a discussion of the resulting Jewish enthusiasm for liberalism to a digression dealing with the relation of Jews and...

Schelling and the Johannine Age - January 24, 2007
Harold Stahmer traces Rosenstock-Huessy's notion of a "Johannine" age to Schelling: "In Schelling's Philosophy of Revelation . . . the millennarian idea of the successive 'ages' of the world - the Petrine, the Pauline, and finally the Johannine - is...

Sade and the cross - January 18, 2007
Notoriously, the Marquis de Sade stole some consecrated wafers, pushed them into a prostitute's vagina, and had sex, saying, "Avenge yourself, if you are God." He meant this as blasphemy, and it is. But his blasphemy only shows just how...

Why Study Rosenstock-Huessy - January 16, 2007
Following are some notes from a lecture on Rosenstock-Huessy, the first session of a class on his work. The scope of his life work is amazing. He wrote on language, religion and the Bible, calendars, time, grammar, a massive and...

Theology from the margins - January 05, 2007
Lubac is by all accounts one of the great Catholic theologians of the past century, and one of the most influential. He never worked on a dissertation, and because of the disruptions of war never went through a great deal...

Exhortation, Sunday After Christmas - December 31, 2006
As we'll see in our sermon this morning, time is a good creation of God, and a good gift to us. Since that's true, we are stewards, not owners, of our time. As stewards, we will have to give an...

In praise of Pietism - December 26, 2006
Friedrich Oetinger was a leading German pietist intellectual and theologian, deeply interested in the science of his day. And critical of science and rationalist philosophy as well. Against thinkers who placed a primacy on reason, Oetinger argued that sheer logical...

Atheisms - December 16, 2006
James Wood is one of the most public of our public atheists, but he has several bones to pick with other members of the brotherhood in a TNR review of Sam Harris's latest book (TNR, December 18). He complains, for...

Boundaries and RO - December 12, 2006
Hans Boersma offers an extended critique of Radical Orthodoxy in the Fall 2006 issue of Pro Ecclesia. Boersma focuses on the issue of boundaries, arguing that Radical Orthodoxy's ontology of peace is hostile to boundaries, seeing them as fluctuating and...

Christ and Radical Orthodoxy - November 21, 2006
The papers in the seminar on the recent Duke publication Theology and the Political: The New Debate were dense, difficult, and hard to follow. And then Graham Ward got up and said, essentially, that the whole point of Radical Orthodoxy...

Isidore of Seville - November 13, 2006
For anyone with $150 of spare change, Cambridge University Press has just published what it's calling the first-ever complete English translation of Isidore's Etymologies, one of the most widely studied books in Christendom between 600 and 1600....

Proteus - November 07, 2006
God cannot deny Himself and is unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth. He never contradicts Himself or becomes other than the faithful God that He is. And yet: Our God is shown to be God...

Poet or poem? - November 07, 2006
Lacan, stressing how language controls us, says "I am not a poet, but a poem." I don't know about Lacan, but that is certainly the case for Christians: "For we are His workmanship (Gr. poema), created in Christ Jesus for...

Liberalism - October 23, 2006
Christopher Insole wants theologians who attack "liberalism" to be more careful about what they're attacking. He favorably cites Robert Song, who distinguishes the constitutional liberalism of Locke and Kant from the laissez-faire liberalism of Hayek from the welfare liberalism of...

Art and Necessity - October 16, 2006
Some quite random highlights from Milbank's very rich essay review of Rowan Williams's Art and Necessity, published in Modern Theology. 1) Milbank makes a numerb of illuminating points about Aquinas's theory of knowledge, supporting some aspects of Maritain's Thomism. Instead...

Persistence of the past - October 11, 2006
The doctrine of original sin is bound up with the conviction that the past inheres in the present, for the human race and for individuals. And for this the denial of original sin is the necessary premise for all revolutionary...

Feuerbach's inversion - October 09, 2006
What theologians was Feuerbach reading? If God is to be transcendent, he said, "the human, considered as such, is depreciated. . . . To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all in all, man must be...

Papal evangelism - October 09, 2006
After noting the political import of the Pope's recent speech (eg, its implicit warning against including Turks in the European Union - in which context the citation of Manuel II Paleologus, who spent his life fighting Turks, was particularly apt),...

Irrationality of Islam - September 17, 2006
Pope Benedict's remarks on Islam have sparked violent protests, and many have noted the irony: Muslims violently protests the Pope's claim that they practice a violent religion. But the Pope's main point in the address was about the detachment of...

Beauty's authority - September 07, 2006
Von Balthasar says somewhere that beauty makes demands, and suggests that this is a natural analogy to the attitude of faith, which is like an aesthetic response to the form of Christ. Beauty makes demands. If I hear the central...

Imprecations - September 07, 2006
A friend, Jim Rogers, offers some thoughtful reflections on imprecatory prayers at: http://lutheranguest.blogspot.com/2006/09/imprecatory-prayer.html...

McCarthy's Proof - August 21, 2006
At the end of the film version of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, the principal character, Cole, asks whether God exists. Cole has been through a infernal trip to Mexico - his lover is taken away from him by...

Effects of dualism - August 14, 2006
Murphy makes this interesting comment, which she admits is an oversimplification: "the adoption of a dualist anthropology in the early centuries of the church was largely responsible for changing Christians' conception of what Christianity is basically all about. I am...

Physicalism and the Bible - August 14, 2006
In her Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge, 2006), Nancey Murphy argues for a non-reductionist version of physicalism on the question of the "body-soul" problem: "This is the view that humans are composed of only one 'part,' a physical...

Not Quite Postmodern - August 11, 2006
In his very fine, lucid book, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? (Baker 2006), James KA Smith notes that many postmodern theologies, especially influenced by Derrida's apophaticism, are anti-dogmatic: "postmodern religious faith eschews knowledge and therefore also eschews the particularity of dogma...

Sermon outline - August 07, 2006
Full Disclosure: I'm always borrowing from James Jordan, but this outline borrows from him more than most. INTRODUCTION We tend to read the Bible as if it were only about God working out our salvation from sin. But that is...

Exhortation - August 06, 2006
When he talks about prayer, Calvin emphasizes that everything in Scripture encourages us to pray. Our condition encourages us to pray: We have no good in ourselves, no hope for salvation in our own efforts; and therefore we must seek...

Sermon outline - August 01, 2006
INTRODUCTION As a church, we believe that before the foundation of the world God ordained whatever happens in the world, down to the slightest detail. But this seems to be contrary to some explicit statements of Scripture, which talk about...

Father of the Prodigal - July 30, 2006
The Pharisees are the surly elder brother in Jesus' parable, and surely they expected that the father would be equally surly - greeting his returned son with harsh rebukes and scolding rather than with joy. How did they miss it?...

Old and new Thomists - July 22, 2006
Bruce Holsinger gives this summary of the conflict between "traditional" Thomists and the advocates of nouvelle theologie during the early decades of the 20th century: "What infuriated . . . the [traditionalist] neo-Thomists about the nouvelle theologie was what they...

Mix and Match - May 13, 2006
A candidate for ministry who holds to a Lutheran view of the real presence and a Calvinist view of double predestination would be welcome in neither Lutheran nor Reformed churches. What does that say about Protestantism? Are the different doctrinal...

PPT - May 10, 2006
A group called "Presbyterians and Presbyterians Together" has formulated a public call to Presbyterian and Reformed pastors and theologians to engage in theological debate with charity, patience, and fairness. For those interested in reading the statement, or signing it, check...

Voluntarism, Intellectualism, Creation - May 10, 2006
The voluntarist/intellectualist debate has always seemed sterile, but it's worth asking why it was so important for the medievals. Where'd it come from? It appears to me to come from a faulty understanding of creation, in which creation/nature has a...

Comic Sabbath - May 09, 2006
Keeping the Lord's Day is the sign that we already enjoy by anticipation the final, eschatological rest. It is a confession of faith in cosmic comedy, the confidence that in the end all will be well, and all manner of...

Gift and Justice - May 08, 2006
Thomas Aquinas argues that a return gift of gratitude must exceed the original gift. His reasoning is as follows: The original gift is gratuitous because it is not paying any debt; the return gift is obligatory because of the initial...

Shoes - May 06, 2006
Explaining the first article of the creed, Luther's small catechism says taht "I believe that God made me and all creatures; that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members . . . also...

Person v. Being - May 04, 2006
Oberman sees a crucial shift in late medieval theology from God as being to God as person, and sees Luther as both heir and critic of the late medieval theology proper. Without the earlier shift, "the Reformation breakthrough would be...

Simmel, Faithfulness and Gratitude - May 03, 2006
Notes on Georg Simmel, "Faithfulness and Gratitude," printed in Kurt H. Wolff, The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Free Press, 1950). 1) Simmel describes faithfulness as "the inertia of the soul." Less impressionistically, faithfulness is "the peculiar feeling which is not...

Milbank on Gift - May 02, 2006
INTRODUCTION To wind up our discussion of gift, we will cover three large concerns. First, we will examine Milbank's work, particularly his essay "Can A Gift Be Given?", to see how he handles the challenges thrown up by Derrida and...

Image of God - April 29, 2006
Gil Baillie, working in a Girardian framework, suggests that the claim that man is made in the image of God means "this creature can only fulfill its destiny by becoming like someone else. So counterinstinctual and counterintuitive is such a...

Background to Marion, Being Given - April 25, 2006
INTRODUCTION Jean-Luc Marion is one of the major figures in contemporary French Philosophy, and particularly a leader in French phenomenology. As introduction to Marion's work on gift and givenness, we'll be looking at the key figures and ideas of phenomenology,...

Exhortation, Second Sunday of Easter - April 23, 2006
Easter is about faith, because Easter is about light. Jesus came as Light from the Father of lights into a world darkened by sin and death, and His light shone especially at the resurrection. At His resurrection, His "appearance was...

Time and the end of actions - April 06, 2006
Why should there be a final judgment when God judges in time? Aquinas answers: "Judgment on something changeable cannot be rendered fully before its consummation. Thus judgment cannot be rendered fully regarding the quality of any action before its completion,...

Surnaturel and Protestantism - April 05, 2006
Milbank asks the intriguing question of whether de Lubac's surnaturel thesis "rather deconstructs the terms of the Schleiermacher/Barth divide." He appears to mean that the polarization of Schleiermacher's "intrinicism" and Barth's "extrinicisim" is dissolved by de Lubac's Thomist understand of...

Gift and Causation - April 05, 2006
Further along his his treatment of de Lubac, Milbank discusses the change in the meaning of causality and divine causality in the medieval period. Drawing on the work of Jacob Schmutz, he gives this account: Prior to 1250, influentia was...

Henri de Lubac: A Brief Introduction - April 05, 2006
INTRODUCTION The French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) was one of the most significant Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, a central figure in the ressourcement movement and the nouvelle theologie movement that inspired the change of atmosphere in...

Grace and nature - March 30, 2006
According to Fergus Kerr, it was Bonaventure, not Thomas, who first employed the axiom "grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it," in his commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences....

Aquinas on Gratitude - March 30, 2006
Comments primarily on Aquinas on Gratitude/Ingratitude (primarily ST, II-II, qs 106-7). Aquinas describes gratitude as a virtue "annexed" to justice, and so to understand his discussion of gratitude, we must get some handle on what he means by justice. In...

Gift and Gratitude in the Middle Ages - March 28, 2006
INTRODUCTION Seneca's de Beneficiis was known to the Christian Middle Ages, as were some of the gift and gratitude customs of the Roman world. We'll examine the use that Aquinas makes of Seneca when we get to the Summa later...

Barth on Gratitude - March 27, 2006
In a 2001 Modern Theology article, Matthew Boulton points to the theme of gratitude in Barth's theology. Gratitude is for Barth the "one but necessary thing which is proper to and is required of him with whom God has graciously...

Foundationalism and Inerrancy - December 29, 2005
Somewhere in his blog discussion of Brian McLaren's Generous Orthodoxy, Doug Wilson indicated that McLaren considers inerrancy a sell-out to modernist foundationalism. To support this, Doug pointed me to this quotation from John Franke's foreword to McLaren's book: "In the...

Aesthetic apologetics - December 28, 2005
Christian apologetics tends to focus on ethical or rational arguments. Questions such as "Can we be good without God?" and "Does that being exist than which nothing greater can be conceived?" and "What are the transcendental conditions of knowledge?" have...

David Wells on Pomo - December 23, 2005
Like many of David Wells's books, I've find his recent Above All Earthly Pow'rs simultaneously bracing, stimulating, and frustrating. Wells examines the consequences of the confluence of two main cultural trends - the postmodern ethos and the increasingly pluralistic religious...

Frame on McLaren - December 21, 2005
John Frame has a typically gracious though critical review of Brian McLaren's Generous Orthodoxy in the current issue of Reformation and Revival Journal. Frame appreciates a number of the concerns that animate McLaren (learning from other Christian traditions, the missional...

Exhortation, Fourth Advent - December 18, 2005
Christmas is a joyful season, but for many it turns into something else. Instead of joy, it is full of disappointment and unhappiness. Instead of an occasion for family fellowship, it becomes an opportunity for opening old wounds, reigniting old...

Mary and the Roman Catholics - December 11, 2005
Protestants, rightly, protest at a number of Roman Catholic claims about Mary. At times, Protestants distort and exaggerate Roman Catholic teachings. That is unfortunate, since the official Catholic teaching is objectionable enough by itself. And the errors of Marian doctrine...

Typology of heresy - December 08, 2005
In his recent Brief History of Christianity, Carter Lindberg suggests that "orthodoxy is the language that preserves the promise character of the gospel, that salvation is received from God, not achieved by humans." By contrast, "heresy is the language that...

Exhortation, First Advent - November 27, 2005
"What time is it?" This may seem a simple and straightforward question. We glance at our watches or at the clock on the wall and give an answer. In fact our answer to this question reveals a great deal about...

Images of God - November 24, 2005
In the Summa theologiae (1.1.9), Thomas argues that "it is more fitting that divine matters should be conveyed under the figure of lowly bodies than of noble bodies." Rocks are better figures for God than ideal forms. Thomas gives three...

Tragedy - November 21, 2005
David Tracy gave a long lecture on the "tragic unconscious of the West." He summarized the tragic vision as including a) necessity; b) intense suffering and c) an active response to suffering that is not necessarily heroic. One of the...

Hart defends himself - November 21, 2005
David Hart responded to several critiques of his book, The Beauty of the Infinite, in an AAR session this morning. Gerard Loughlin defended Nicholas Lash against Hart's assaults on his endorsement of a tragic reading of the gospels. Hart responded...

Rehabilitating patriarchy - November 17, 2005
Russell Moore gave a vigorous presentation at ETS on why egalitarians are winning the evangelical gender debate. He summarized some of the recent sociological work on evangelical family life, which presents a mixed picture. On the one hand, Bradford Wilcox's...

Ratzinger's record - November 12, 2005
Not long ago, Frank Schaeffer frothed out a piece of mind-boggling stupidity in the San Francisco Chronicle attacking Pope Benedict XVI as a fundamentalist. It says something about Ratzinger's learning that he is the author of 86 books, 470 articles,...

Riches for the world - November 12, 2005
Richard Klinghoffer argues in his Why the Jews Rejeced Jesus that pagan Europeans would not have embraced Jesus if the Jews had not rejected Him: "If you value the great achievements of Western civilization and of American society, thank the...

Light and Dark - November 01, 2005
God is light and there is no darkness in Him (1 John 1:5). Eschatologically, the alternation of light and dark ceases for the creation (Rev. 21:25). Yet, all things were created by Him and manifest Him, and the first form...

Puritans and mediation - October 24, 2005
Mark Noll makes the following important distinction between the Puritans and later evangelicals: "Although Puritans stood against Catholic and Anglican formalism, salvation for the Puritans was still mediated by institutions - family, church, covenanted society; in evangelicalism (at least in...

On Women Theologians - October 24, 2005
In an intriguing book published some years ago, historian David Noble described the origins of modern science among medieval monks and friars who lived in what Noble called "a world without women." Though the book promoted every trendy academic fad...

Grace and evil - September 27, 2005
As posed by what Jurgen Moltmann has called "protest atheism," the problem of evil is usually framed as a contradiction within theism, particularly biblical theism. Evil exists: God is either good but impotent to stop evil, or He is omnipotent...

Sapientia and Scientia - September 22, 2005
Augustine taught that scientia, knowledge of historical events, was necessary for Christian theology, but that all theology aspired to love of God, which is more closely bound with "sapientia" or wisdom. By the time Aquinas raised the question of whether...

Matter and spirit - September 13, 2005
Discussing the question of the corporeality of angels, Herman Bavinck argues that angels cannot have bodies because that would imply they are material and "matter and spirit are mutually exclusive." He charges that "it is a form of pantheistic identity...

Augustine and Cultural Diversity - September 09, 2005
Augustine has a sense of cultural diversity and historical change usually associated with post-Renaissance western thought. In Book 3 of On Christian Teaching he warns against the mistake of taking a literal statement in Scripture as figurative, and offers this...

Theology and the Political - September 05, 2005
Duke University Press has just come out with a collection of essays edited by Creston Davis, John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek on political theology. As one might expect from the list of contributors (Milbank, Pickstock, Ward, Conor Cunningham, Kenneth Surin,...

Necessity of Anthropomorphism - August 22, 2005
Bavinck argues that without anthropomorphism, we have only skepticism and agnosticism: "Those . . . who contest our right to use anthropomorphisms, thereby in princiuple deny the possibility that God in fact reveals himself in his creatures, are logically bound...

Violence and counter-violence - August 15, 2005
Milbank argues that, given its ontology of violence, paganism can only respond to violence with a counter-violence of its own. Political and social thus do not rest on peaceful donation or harmony but on the threat and actual practice of...

Christian speech - August 14, 2005
Robert Louis Wilken has a very fine piece on the "church's way of speaking" in the Aug/Sept issue of First Things. He points out that the church's faith is not merely "doctrinal propositions, creedal affirmations, and moral codes" but "a...

Christian Scholarship - August 14, 2005
Kierkegaard: "Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close . . . We would be sunk if it were...

Fundamentalism revealed! - August 01, 2005
Fundamentalism in its "actual content, experiences, opinions, history, and theories" is "so diverse as to defy synthesis." So writes Berkeley sociologist Manuel Castells in The Power of Identity (Blackwell, 2004). Yet, thanks to an exhaustive study commissioned by the American...

Exhortation, July 31 - July 31, 2005
On stage and in movies, revenge stories often end in bloodshed. To avenge herself on her ex-husband Jason for taking another wife, Medea kills her own children. Orestes kills his mother because she murdered his father and her husband, and...

Real Absence - July 27, 2005
In Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson observes through he narrator Ruth that absence is actually a more intense form of presence. As long as friends and family are physically empirically here, they are localized and circumscribed. Absent, memory finds them in every...

Desire, Prayer and Politics - July 23, 2005
Some reflections on a very stimulating lecture by Jeff Meyers on the Song of Songs at the Biblical Horizons Summer Conference. 1) Jeff pointed out that many modern commentators complain that allegorical interpretations of the Song "de-sex" it. But the...

Socrates and the erotic gaze - July 14, 2005
Catherine Pickstock argues that Socrates does not articulate a "metaphysical" view of self-presence or interiority. She focuses on the erotic character of knowledge in the Phaedrus, which she points out, radically undermines the interior/exterior boundary. Knowledge on this view always...

Wedding Sermon - July 11, 2005
So far as Scripture is concerned, the marriage of Adam and Eve was the first, and the last, nude wedding. As soon as Adam sinned, he and Eve made aprons, and later the Lord replaced those with animal skins. Clothing...

Salvation and Semiosis in Augustine's de Doctrina Christiana - July 04, 2005
Augustine's de doctrina Christiana is most relevant to contemporary theological and philosophical concerns. It anticipates Wittgenstein, Peirce, and Eco, as well as the cultural anthropologists; it has an almost postmodern feel at certain points; it is a text in theological...

To Set Our Hope on Christ - June 25, 2005
ECUSA has recently released its response to the Windsor Report's invitation to explain "from within the sources of authority that we as Anglicans have received in scripture, the apostolic tradition and reasoned reflection, how a person living in a same...

Does God cause sin? - June 01, 2005
Aquinas de malo, Question 3, article 1: Does God cause sin? One can be a �cause of sin�Ein two ways, first by sinning and second by causing another to sin. God does not cause sin in either sense. Regarding the...

Cusa and Renaissance - May 20, 2005
I've posted a number of times on Cusa in the past, and the following builds on notes and outline that I posted in Febrary 2004. NICHOLAS OF CUSA This is a continuation of the earlier essay on Renaissance and modernity....

Say it ain't so, Nicholas - May 20, 2005
For reasons that I'll detail in a subsequent post, I'm a considerable fan of Nicholas of Cusa. I was unhappy to come across this from William Cavanaugh: "The origin of the modern concept of religion can be seen clearly in...

Infra/Supra and Narrative theology - May 09, 2005
Awhile back, I suggested some reasons for leaning toward supralapsarianism. Here's some more: Infra seems to lack an eschatology. Creation is made, the fall is decreed, and then salvation is seen as a rescue from the fall. In supra, creation...

Sign and Signified - May 09, 2005
Is the issue of the theory of signs perhaps simply the question of where one places the distinction of signifier/signified? In Christian creationist perspective, everything created is signifier of God. This is its most fundamental essence and purpose, to show...

Liberalism and Not-So-Postliberalism - May 09, 2005
The following includes some material from published essays, but also includes new material. In his third lecture on the �Essence of Christianity,�Edelivered at the turn of the century, Adolf von Harnack expressed a common modern understanding of the nature of...

More on Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite - May 04, 2005
Covenant of Light. This section concludes Part I of The Beauty of the Infinite, entitled �Dionysus Against the Crucified.�E With this section, Hart concludes his critique of classical, modern and postmodern thought, and the outlines of the Christian ontology that...

Presbytery Summary - April 27, 2005
Earlier this year, the Pacific NW Presbytery of the PCA asked me to summarize my views on a number of points that have become controversial. Here is that summary. As a preliminary, let me say a word about how the...

Exhortation, April 24 - April 24, 2005
This exhortation was inspired by recent lectures by James Jordan. In this morning�s sermon, Pastor Wilson will be talking about learning and growth in marriage, and as he will point out that this growth, even apart from sin, can be...

Response to MVP Report - April 03, 2005
I posted this a few weeks ago, but since then my web site has been experiencing technical difficulties and this post disappeared. Apart from a couple of slight stylistic changes, this is the same post. My work is cited several...

Response to Mississippi Valley Report - March 18, 2005
My work is cited several times in the recent Mississippi Valley Presbytery Report on the New Perspective and the Federal Vision. Since that Report has been widely cited and discussed, I suppose some response is in order. I am not...

More on Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite - March 17, 2005
Hart has previously discussed various postmodernism options for aesthetics, showing how postmodernism reduces to an ontology of violence or a discourse of the sublime. Now he turns to Nietzsche to ask whether he provides a possible future for thought. III....

Waiting - March 08, 2005
A student perceptively suggests that first-century Jews had become so attached to waiting for the Messiah that they could not bring themselves to acknowledge the fulfillment of their hopes. Against all that the prophets had taught, they had become tragic,...

More on Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite - March 03, 2005
Part 1: Dionysus against the Crucified. Section 1: City and the Wastes. Hart raises the question, What is postmodernism? And he answers by citing Milbank�s claim that postmodern French philosophers, for all their differences, are united in an �ontology of...

Mediology and Theology - February 21, 2005
A number of years ago, Regis Debray introduced the notion of "mediology" in an article in Le Monde. His intention was to break down the divisions between technology and culture, to show that the "higher" expressions of culture were shaped...

Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite - February 17, 2005
This is the first of what may turn out to be (but also may not turn out to be) a series of outlines or summaries of David Bentley Hart�s Beauty of the Infinite. My goal in this outline (or, these...

Theology and Metaphysics - February 15, 2005
David Hart describes the work of theology, as opposed to the work of metaphysics, as follows: "Theology is not an art that abstracts from history toward eternity, from facts toward principles, but one that - under the pressure of the...

Argument from Motion - January 29, 2005
Joshua Appel, pastoral assistant at Trinity Reformed Church, informs me that Aquinas' argument from motion is not what many (including me) think it is. It is not an argument that God is the first domino in the line; rather, it...

Theological Controversy - December 16, 2004
A couple of illuminating quotations from Robert Letham's fine new book, The Holy Trinity (P&R): Letham defends Origen against charges of heresy and proto-Arianism (while duly noting some of the troubling statements in Origen's writings), and adds: "Origen is a...

Exhortation, Third Sunday in Adent - December 12, 2004
This morning I want to address the students in the congregation �Enot merely the college students but all other students we well. During the Christmas holidays, you will probably spend much more of your time at home than you have...

Feminist Theology - December 10, 2004
A few thoughts after listening to student presentations on feminist theology all morning. (I know, BTW, that there are all sorts and conditions of feminist theology.) 1) Rosemary Reuther says that Jesus' maleness is an "accident," on par with the...

Exhortation, Second Sunday in Advent - December 05, 2004
Christmas is about many things, but one of the chief things revealed in the gospel of Christmas is the humility of God. We don�t often think of humility as an attribute of God. If God is glorious and exalted, we...

Reno on Genesis - November 24, 2004
Rusty Reno had some sharp observations on the importance of creatio ex nihilo in a paper giving a preview of his theological commentary on Genesis. He said that it fit with the overall Scriptural polemic against idolatry, and demonstrates that...

Hauerwas on "Radical Democracy" - November 24, 2004
Stanley Hauerwas gave an interesting paper offering a Christian defense of "Radical Democracy." He covered some of the work of John Howard Yoder, who on Hauerwas' reading is by no means politically quietist, albeit he is a pacifist. The most...

RO, Augustine, and Borders - November 20, 2004
Hans Boersma offered an interesting critique of the notion of "borders" in Radical Orthodoxy and some of its fellow travelers, especially concerning their relationship to Augustine's conception of the city of God. The two terms of his analysis were "ontology...

Edwards: Christology and Trinity - November 17, 2004
There were two good presentations on Edwards theology at ETS this morning. The first, by Robert Caldwell of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, focused on the role of the Spirit in Edwards's Christology. Caldwell's main point was that the Spirit...

Sloth, or Whatever - November 10, 2004
INTRODUCTION Sloth has historically been listed among the �deadly sins,�Ealong with wrath, envy, lust, and the like. The Bible gives strong support to this description of sloth. It is indeed a deadly sin, an enemy of life in the widest...

Exhortation, October 24 - October 25, 2004
Should Christians vote in this year�s Presidential election? The question is a reasonable one. All of the candidates have glaring flaws, and the candidates that you find most agreeable have no chance at all to win the election. Your vote...

Barth on Revelation - October 22, 2004
Trevor Hart has a helpful article on Barth�s view of revelation in the Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth. First, Hart sketches the neo-Kantian philosophical and theological context for Barth�s work. For Barth, nineteenth-century �consciousness theology,�Ethe attempt to ground theology in...

Purpose of Theology - October 08, 2004
Barth offers these wise words about the purpose of dogmatics (which consists, for Barth, of the correction, clarification, and criticism of church proclamation by measuring proclamation against the Word of God in the Bible): "Repetitive exposition according to the intentions...

Apostasy and Conversion - October 07, 2004
Though resting a theological case on a linguistic "accident" would be a mistake, it is intriguing that the Hebrew word for "convert" is the same as the Hebrew word for "go apostate." The word in both cases is SHUB, "turn,"...

Wedding Sermon - October 02, 2004
I read from Genesis 2:21-23 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh at that place. And the Lord God...

Wedding Sermon, September 25 - September 25, 2004
Today, you are entering into the covenant of Christian marriage. David, you�re swearing in God�s name that you will love Alisha as Jesus loves the church and gave Himself for her. You are promising with an oath to give your...

Luther, Hermeneutics, Justification - September 22, 2004
In his excellent and stimulating book, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, Alister McGrath includes a chapter on early Reformation hermeneutics, and its relation to the medieval quadriga. He also notes the close connection between the developments in hermeneutics...

Blood - September 17, 2004
Below is a transcript of a lecture delivered at Disputatio for NSA on Friday, September 17. INTRODUCTION In February of 1666, the English physician Richard Lower performed what he called a �spectacular experiment�E Using a crude syringe made from a...

Barth on Intellect - September 13, 2004
Barth issues a sharp caution for those who frequently condemn the Reformed emphasis on the "primacy of the intellect" (CD 1.1): "What man does when he uses this faculty, when he thinks and tries to understand, can in fact be...

Exhortation, September 12 - September 12, 2004
The Bible gives a lot of attention to sacred architecture. About 1/3 of the book of Exodus is a detailed and repetitive description of the dimensions and furnishings of the tabernacle. We have two descriptions of the temple of Solomon,...

Just War - August 30, 2004
Oliver O'Donovan's Just War Revisited (reviewed in the August 13 TLS) presents just war as "a means of delivering judgment when all other means of judging a dispute have failed. Since war arises in the absence of an adequate formal...

Exhortation, August 29 - August 29, 2004
Earlier this month, we celebrated the end of the first year of our existence as Trinity Reformed Church. This occasion gives us reason to pause to reminder ourselves what we hope to do as a local congregation. Since we started...

Exhortation, August 22 - August 22, 2004
Welcome back to the students. As you are starting a new year of school, you have been and will be talked at, exhorted, and challenged many times. And this is going to be one of those times. To the NSA...

Wedding Sermon, August 20 - August 20, 2004
You know what the Lord requires of you in your marriage. You heard Genesis 2 and Ephesians 5 just moments ago, and you have often heard them often before. You have listened repeatedly as the biblical teaching on marriage has...

Wedding Sermon, July 16 - July 16, 2004
Proverbs 9:1-6, 13-18: Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn out her seven pillars; she has prepared her food, she has mixed her wine; she has also set her table; she has sent out her maidens, she calls from...

Wedding Sermon, June 2 - July 03, 2004
Isaiah 62:1-5 For Zion�s sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem�s sake I will not keep quiet, until her righteousness goes forth like brightness, and her salvation like a torch that is burning. And the nations will see...

Eros and Agape Again - July 02, 2004
A purely disinterested agapic love, if it is even possible, is not selfless but the opposite. A purely disinterested love, one that does not communicate a desire for love in return, is an act of power. A man who loves...

God and Eros - June 29, 2004
So, here�s the problem: 1. Eros is desire and love for beauty, evoked by and responding to beauty in the object of desire. 2. God loves us in spite of our ugliness. 3. Therefore, God�s love for us is not...

Wedding Sermon, June 25 - June 26, 2004
Ephesians 5:1-2, 25 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma. . ....

Kline on Covenant of Works - June 22, 2004
In his very useful study, God & Adam: Reformed Theology and the Creation Covenant, Rowland S. Ward has this to say about Meredith Kline's views on the un-gracious character of the covenant of works: "Contrary to his position in 1968,...

More Bad Taste - June 22, 2004
I should clarify my final, hurried comments on Brown's discussion of sin and bad taste. I suggested at the end of the last post that Brown's initial mapping of the problem contributes to an unsatisfying conclusion regarding moral and aesthetic...

Sin and Bad Taste - June 22, 2004
One of the challenges of a Christian aesthetics is sorting through the connections and distinctions between holiness and good taste on the one hand, and sin and bad taste on the other. In his 1989 book, Religious Aesthetics, Frank Burch...

Don Richardson and Contextualization - June 22, 2004
Don Richardson's Peace Child is a classic of modern mission writing. In that book, Richardson tells of his experience among the Sawi people of New Guinea, and how he used their traditional custom of exchanging a "peace child" between warring...

God's Beauty and the World's - June 17, 2004
Hart argues that the beauty of creation should not be seen as competing with the beauty of God; sensible things do not in themselves distract from God, but rather our corrupt desires reduces the things of the world to "inert...

Cusa on Beauty - June 17, 2004
OK, I can't stop writing down remarks from Hart, so here's another: "Nicolas of Cusa remarks that eternal wisdom is tasted in everything savored, eternal pleasure felt in all things pleasurabl, eternal beauty beheld in all that is beautiful, and...

David Hart - June 17, 2004
Here are some more excerpts from David Bentley Hart's remarkable Beauty of the Infinite. "The Bible ... depicts creation at once as a kind of deliberative invention ('Let us make...') and, consequently, as a kind of play, a kind of...

Wedding Sermon, June 5 - June 06, 2004
Weddings are beautiful; few events are more so: The silken cascade of the bride's dress, the sanctuary warm with candlelight, the austere elegance of a black tuxedo, the dignified choreography of procession and recession, the indescribable transcendence of Jupiter straining...

Of Preaching and Newspapers - June 01, 2004
Sermons are rarely more tiresome than when they strive for relevance. Drawing from the latest headlines transforms the preacher into a one-man MacLaughlin Group, a Crossfire without the cross though perhaps with some of the fire, and leaves the congregation...

Death of Liberalism? - June 01, 2004
Among theologians, it has become de rigeur to attack liberalism. Several decades ago, George Lindbeck and Hans Frei formulated the foundations of what has come to be called �postliberal�Etheology, and John Milbank and his Radical Orthodoxy colleagues attack liberal theology...

Metaphysical Ascesis - May 27, 2004
Sacra doctrina, for Aquinas, involves the stripping of idols. So says Fergus Kerr: "Step by step, once we learn to read the text in this way, one idolatrous temptation after another is stripped away. The apophatic theology is designed to...

Derrida and Apophaticism - May 26, 2004
Denys Turner considers tradition and faith in the January 2004 issue of the IJST, but the more obvious subject is Derrida and the tradition of negative theology, particularly as expressed in Pseudo-Denys (no relation) and Eckhart. Turner deftly disposes of...

Christ as Art - May 26, 2004
Robert Jenson continues his series of essays on Christ as Culture in the January 2004 issue of IJST, arguing that "Christ is Art." Here are a few of the highlights: 1) Jenson defines art as experimentation with possible worlds. One...

Beauty - May 25, 2004
It would seem that non-Trinitarian ontologies cannot secure a notion of beauty, and this seems to be the case because of the tragic ontologies that dominate non-Christian thought. 1) Beauty is fittingness, a matter of harmonics. Thus, beauty requires that...

Enemies - May 12, 2004
Here is an address I gave at NSA graduation, May 12, 2004. Graduating Seniors, Parents, Friends of the College, Colleagues: It is a great privilege to address you all this evening, especially the graduating seniors. I am more grateful than...

Robbins and Against Christianity - April 28, 2004
John Robbins's current Trinity Review is devoted to a sharply negative review of my book Against Christianity. So far as I can tell, Robbins caught me in one error: I did, as he said, misuse the phrase "beg the question"...

Anti-Gnostic Resources - March 31, 2004
In Theology after Wittgenstein, Fergus Kerr (1986) launched a Wittgensteinian attack on the modern, Cartesian gnosticism that he found operative in Karl Rahner, Hans Kung, and Don Cuppitt. According to Kerr�s account, Wittgenstein challenges the Cartesian occlusion of the body...

New Time, New Space, New Creation - March 31, 2004
Fundamental to any cultural scheme is the organization of the two basic coordinates of human life, space and time. A social and cultural world is at least a particular imaginative and physical ordering of these coordinates. Israel�s life as a...

Accommodation - March 14, 2004
Accommodation is a way of handling the "problem" of theological language. Since God is the infinite Creator and we are creatures, He can speak to us only by "accommodating" His language to our capacities. This sometimes goes so far as...

The Passion - March 09, 2004
Leon Wieseltier, not surprisingly, has a blisteringly negative review of Gibson's film in the March 8 issue of TNR. Along the way, though, Wieseltier's article is inadvertently insightful. Here is his description of the violence of the torture: "There is...

Christianity and the Religions - March 09, 2004
A review of a new history of modernity in the TLS raises a number of intriguing questions. The author of the volume claims that the age of nations is over, and that history writing has to catch up. History writing...

The Antiquity of Moses - March 04, 2004
The church fathers went to great lengths to prove that Moses was both more antique than Greek sages, and also to show that the Greek sages were dependent on Moses. While historically plausible, these efforts a form of Christian apologetics...

All Is Vapor - March 03, 2004
Ecclesiastes teaches that all is vapor, nothing but vapor. Trying to shape and control the world is, Solomon teaches us, like trying to scupt the mist (the image comes from Jim Jordan). Every ancient sage came to the same conclusion...

The Sophist Critique of Nomos - February 11, 2004
Should theology agree with the sophist critique of nomos? It would seem so, as Thomas would say: The institutions of society are the product of human construction, and the claim that they are rooted in "nature" is a rhetorical device....

Gd's Righteousness and Eschatology - February 02, 2004
As mentioned in an earlier post, Paul says that God works out salvation through the cross and resurrection so that "God might BE just and the justifier of those who are of the faith of Jesus." That "be" is crucial;...

Faith and Heresy - January 28, 2004
Barth says that the conflict of faith and heresy is far more serious and important than the conflicts between faith and unbelief. Unbelief cannot be taken with seriousness, he says, because we believe in the forgiveness of sins. But heresy...

Barth on Faith - January 27, 2004
Barth defines faith as the "determination of human action by the being of the Church and therefore by Jesus Christ, by the gracious address of God to man." While there may be weaknesses with this, there are several commendable things...

Theology as Science Again - January 27, 2004
If, as Barth says, theology NEED not be part of the genus "science," why has it been so designated? It appears that the impetus is an effort to achieve precisely the things that Barth says it does NOT need from...

Theology as Science? - January 27, 2004
Barth quotes from J. Gerhard, who rejected the designation of theology as a science. One of his grounds was: "scientiae certitudo ab internis et inhaerentibus principiis, fidei vero ab externis videlicet ab autoritate revelantis pendet," which in substance means that...

Cusa - January 16, 2004
Ernst Cassirer (The Individual and Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy) characterizes Nicholas of Cusa as the first modern man in that he focused the concern of philosophy not on God but on "knowledge about God." In this emphasis, Cusa was making...

Almost Too Effective - January 15, 2004
The gospel has done its work almost too effectively. OC institutions and forms �Esacrifice, laws of uncleanness, central sanctuaries, gradations of priestly privilege, distinctive dress �Ewere the very stuff of life of ancient Israel. When it is said that the...

Evil and Good - January 14, 2004
CS Lewis says in Pilgrim's Regress: "Evil is fissiparous, and could never in a thousand eternities find any way to arrest its own reproduction. If it could, it could be no longer evil: for Form and Limit belong to the...

Barth on God's Omnipotence - January 12, 2004
Barth has a wonderful discussion of the omnipotence of God in Dogmatics in Outline (pp 48-49). He disputes the notion of absolute power, power in itself, as a description of God's almightiness, and concludes (in line with the tradition of...

No Better Argument - January 10, 2004
In his splendid Beauty of the Infinite (about which more later), David Hart says something to the effect that "the church has no argument deeper or more basic than Jesus." That is a remarkably concise way of undercutting a certain...

Miles on God - January 07, 2004
In the midst of saying some very odd and wacky things, Jack Miles does have some insights to offer in his God: A Biography. Most especially, there's his notion that the unity of the Bible (he's dealing with the OT)...

NT Wright's Rutherford House Lecture - January 06, 2004
Some thoughts on NT Wright's Rutherford House Lecture, August 2003. I have little disagreement with much of the lecture, and it clarified a number of things for me. Wright's views on justification, however, continue to puzzle me at a number...

Healy on "Practice" - January 04, 2004
Nicholas Healy has a useful article on the notion of "practice" in recent ecclesiology in the Nov 2003 issue of the International Journal of Systematic Theology. He begins by distinguishing two trends within recent ecclesiology, both of which focus on...

Exhortation, January 4 - January 04, 2004
Exhortation for January 4: Sexual immorality has marked all non-Christian civilizations. Leviticus 18 gives a laundry list of sexual sins �Eincest, adultery, sodomy, bestiality�Eand ends with this exhortation: "Do not defile yourselves by any of these things; for by all...

Christian Language - December 24, 2003
David Martin's Christian Language and Its Mutations: Essays in Sociological Understanding has some good moments. The big problem first: He seems to assume that sacred and secular are divided by a given (though fluid) boundary, and thus argues that Christianity...

The Beauty of the Infinite - December 23, 2003
David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite looks to be one of those books to savor, read, reread, mark, and inwardly digest. I've only read a bit of it, but it's as masterful as his articles. (Stylisically, the book...

Feminist Theology - December 16, 2003
Here's a thesis to explore: The problems of feminist theology are intertwined with issues of sacramental theology and theological semiotics. If the SYMBOLISM of male and female is epiphenomenal, then feminist theology makes sense. If symbol and essence are co-determining,...

Exhortation, December 14 - December 14, 2003
I want particularly to address our out-of-town college students this morning, though what I have to say has some application to everyone. So, don't tune out. This coming week, most of you students will be returning home for the holidays,...

Ward, Religion, and Romeo and Juliet - December 13, 2003
Graham Ward begins his book True Religion with a discussion of the use of the word "religion" in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and then compares two film versions to explore how the religious theme of the play is handled. The...

John Donne on Virginity - December 08, 2003
John Donne on Virginity (from Paradoxes and Problemes): "I call not that Virginity a vertue, which resideth only in the Bodies integrity. . . But I call that Virginity a vertue which is willing and desirous to yeeld it selfe...

Pastoral Similitude - December 08, 2003
A pastoral similitude, in honor of Jonathan Edwards: What to do with a low-burning fire? Sometimes, additional wood will smother the fire. But sometimes additional wood is just what the fire needs to revive. So, when zeal is running at...

Presuppositionalism? - December 04, 2003
Based on a student's questioning, I'm wondering whether "presuppositionalism" is the best term to describe what Vantillians are after. We don't, after all, come up with some kind of set of axioms or theological idea "prior" to receiving revelation. We...

Root and Milbank on Gift - November 24, 2003
Michael Root raised some pointed questions about Milbank's views on gift. The most cogent criticism was about Milbank's view of the atonement, in which he argued that there is no "Godward" move in the atonement for Milbank. Milbank explicitly rejects...

Green on Gunton on Augustine - November 23, 2003
Brad Green of Union University gave a talk on Gunton's Augustine, in which he got everything exactly right. He was respectful toward Gunton, but finally concluded that Gunton had not read Augustine correctly, that Augustine said all the things that...

Contemporary Readings of Augustine - November 23, 2003
Jamie Smith of Calvin College gave an excellent talk on contemporary readings of Augustine, focusing on the Augustine of Derrida, Caputo, and Ward. According to Smith, Derrida and Caputo have some "formal" or "structural" affinities with Augustine (eg, love is...

Franke on "Indirect Revelation" - November 20, 2003
John Franke's ETS presentation on "indirect revelation" was revealing. Drawing explicitly from Barth, he argued that the concept of "indirect revelation" provided an outlook on revelation that was both faithful to the historic Christological formulas of the patristic period (God...

Intellectualism and Voluntarism both arise - November 06, 2003
Intellectualism and voluntarism both arise from the same theological error: from the assumption that there is some realm that is independent and autonomous. This is most obvious with intellectualism: For intellectualists, things have indepdendent value that God recognizes and evaluates....

Auburn Avenue - November 01, 2003
In many respects, the issues in the current "Auburn Avenue" debate are not at all new to the Reformed world. There have been differences concerning sacramental efficacy, apostasy, antinomian/neonomianism, and other related issues. What reasons do we have to hope...

Natural Theology - October 27, 2003
Alan Jacobs reviews Stanley Hauerwas's Against the Grain of the Universe in the current issue of Books & Culture, and Hauerwas talks about Barth's insight that natural theology can never be "first" theology: "Barth discovered early in his career that...

Homosexual Acts as Antisacrament - October 22, 2003
In his book on the "moral vision of the NT," Richard Hays refers to homosexual acts as an "antisacrament" of rebellion against God, a visible (even ritual?) manifestation of a rejection of the Creator and His created order. This is...

Wedding Sermon, October 11 - October 11, 2003
A wedding sermon from October 11: At the beginning of his letter to the Romans, Paul describes himself as a "bond-servant of Jesus Christ, called an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God." By the last phrase "gospel of...

First Comes Love - October 04, 2003
Scott Hahn's First Comes Love is, overall, a very fine book. It is a Trinitarian treatment of biblical theology that focuses on sacrificial self-giving as the mode of divine life that is to be replicated in the life of the...

Silence - September 24, 2003
Silence is often seen as the summit of piety. Barth wisely says: "Confronted with the mystery of God, the creature must be silent: not merely for the sake of being silent, but for the sake of hearing. Only to the...

Quotations from Barth - September 24, 2003
A couple of quotations from Barth (both from Church Dogmatics, II.2, p. 5), not surprising or unusual in the post-Barth theological world, but well said: "We should still not have learned to say 'God' correctly (i.e., as understood in the...

Smith on Pickstock - September 24, 2003
James Smith of Calvin College has an important analysis of Catherine Pickstock's attempt to conflate Christian incarnation and Platonic participation in his book, Speech and Theology (in the Radical Orthodoxy series). He admits that participation can affirm the material and...

More Theological Anthropology - September 22, 2003
Russell's article, mentioned in the previous post, scores a few points against Zizi and a relational emphasis in theological anthropology. His main criticisms, however, do not touch a high Reformed anthropology. One of his criticisms is that Zizi does not...

Russell on Zizioulas - September 22, 2003
Writing in the July 2003 issue of the International Journal of Systematic Theology, one Edward Russell argues that Zizioulas's relational anthropology fails, in part, because of an inadequate doctrine of sin. I'm with him there. But then he quotes from...

Christ and Nihilism - September 22, 2003
There's a wonderful article in the October 2003 issue of First Things by David B. Hart, an Orthodox theology who teaches at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota (also home to William Cavanagh, one of the most...

Barth's Actualism Again - September 09, 2003
Here's the same problem elsewhere in Barth (again relying on Hunsinger's treatment): This encounter with God, he argued, was mediated, not immediate, and was given by grace, not by nature. The encounter was objectively mediated by Jesus Christ, and given...

Hunsinger on Barth's Actualism - September 09, 2003
George Hunsinger describes one of the implications of Barth's "actualism" in this way: Negatively [actualism] means that we human beings have no ahistorical relationship to God, and that we also have no capacity in and of ourselves to enter into...

Theology, Music, and Time - August 28, 2003
Here is a very partial review/summary of a wonderfully stimulating book. I hope to go over it again sometime and add to this, but here it is in its unfinished form. Jeremy Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge Studies in...

The Soul of Reciprocity - August 28, 2003
I found several reviews (and partial reviews) of articles and books on my hard drive, and will post them here. Some of them were posted on a now-defunct web site, so this will make them available on the web, for...

Theology in Rhetorical Mode - August 19, 2003
David S. Cunningham's book Faithful Persuasion is a defense of doing theology in a rhetorical mode. Among other things, he offers a devastating deconstruction of an argument for the historical critical method of exegesis. First, he quotes Benjamin Jowett: It...

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