Category: Theology
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The Layers of Intelligent Design
First, the primordial cosmos: the earth was “without form and void”. This is not something other than matter. (You actually can’t imagine something other than matter. Even when you imagine energy, you create a picture drawn from visible aspects of matter.) What God made was, rather, unorganized matter. The language suggests “random” – the only…
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Grace versus Karma, by Bono
This exchange has become well-known and Bono is praised for his acumen: Bono: Yes, I think that’s normal. It’s a mind-blowing concept that the God who created the universe might be looking for company, a real relationship with people, but the thing that keeps me on my knees is the difference between Grace and Karma.…
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Dressing for worship
The truth is that both dressing down and dressing up are biblical, as are all styles of music. When the Lord was worshiped in the temple they used their best dress and pomp and circumstance. They also used every instrument they could get their hands on and made quite a hoopla. But then…
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This, Yet That: The Rhythm of Orthodoxy
The New Testament does not teach “two natures in one person”, if that means two blobs, joined at the hip. The church used that nomenclature to articulate the implications of the NT, in a process dominated by the Greek static concept “nature”. Those who articulated “two natures in one person” would also hold…
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Against Iconoclasts
## connect up to discussion of images In a culture filled with idols, the Ante-Nicene fathers were right to distrust pictures and statues. But to make their distrust into a dominant mood for all times and places is to over-react. This wouldn’t be the first issue which Tertullian and Jerome carried to an extreme in…
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Ontological rank is the limit on knowing.
There never was a nothing. First there was God, then there was a something. Since the effect cannot be greater than the cause, the some-thing is less than the God thing. Because it is second and therefore less, and since comprehension is just a form of circumscription. logically the second thing cannot comprehend the first…
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Athens, Jerusalem, and Mecca
There was an Aristotelian thread and a Platonist thread in Christian thought from early on. Aristotle himself was lost to the West for a while — not because of some mythical “stranglehold” the church had on larger society, but because of the cultural disaster called the fall of Rome, which took centuries to recover from.…
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On Untimely Death
Natural forces act randomly. God stopped controlling the natural world at the moment Eve ate the pomegranate, in deference to her free choice. So people die, at bad times, in bad ways, without seeming to deserve it, and this is our chief indictment of God. But, come, let’s reason together. There is some cold logic…
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To a friend who is tired of the churches
Forget all the theology you’ve ever heard and all the churches you’ve ever been in. Get a copy of the gospels that has no chapter and verse divisions so you’ll forget it is supposed to be sacred. Read the 4 books like you’d read any biography: to touch the essence of the person. Try to…
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Speaking Of The Dead
The unique thing about flesh-and-blood people (as opposed to people in, say, political discourse) is that they are simultaneously good and bad. An artist might paint brilliant dogs yet kick his actual dog. One might serve soup to the homeless by day yet be unfaithful to the spouse by night. There are men…