Category: Theology
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Gnostics, Gnostics, Everywhere
“”Gnosticism” actually is capable of a specific enough meaning to be useful, and was useful in the first few centuries of the church. As the Greek term gnosis implies, it describes any salvation from a cognitive secret. “Before you knew this thing x, you were lost, but now that you have received the secret, you are “saved”.”…
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Inerrancy or Silence
When the church abandons the belief that the New Testament is inerrant, it eventually runs out of anything to talk about. This slippery slope has no bottom; you fall forever. I acknowledge lots of problems with the traditional discussions of inerrancy, mostly for the same reason the effort to define _how_ Jesus is present in…
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David Bentley Hart: “…actus essendi subsistens…”
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/beyond-disbelief-1081 In purely theoretical terms, the question of the transcendent source of reality is an ontological—not a causal—question: not how things have come to be what they are, but how it is that things exist at all. And none of the customary post-Christian attempts to make the question of being disappear can possibly succeed: even…
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The Protestant Neurosis
Today we heard in church that “our significance is based not on what do or are, but on the fact that God loves us.” That we have “a forgiveness-based relationship with God, not a performance based relationship”. This is the decision that created Protestantism. And our churches spend enormous amounts of energy reminding ourselves…
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Now You Don’t, Now You See It
It is hard to say anything about creation ex-nihilo, except that we observe it. One instant nothing exists; the next, it does. There is little reason to either assert or deny such models as “the Big Bang”, though evangelical Christians get all worked up over them. The Big Bang is simply a backward extrapolation of…
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On Talking About Creativity
Before “Let there be light” there is only “without form, and void”. What precedes God’s Creation ex-nihilo implies that it is impossible to talk about the creative process. You can stand outside it and talk about appearances, but you can’t stand inside it and talk about it. The “meta” mode of discourse instantly loses touch…
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My Credo
Some people read things I’ve written and may miss the irony, sarcasm, or some other tone. They wonder if I’ve become a zen jedi druid or something. For the record and for anyone who cares, here is what I believe until another memo is officially issued: I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker…
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Fatherlessness
This generation of evangelicals really is fatherless and adrift. They know that, they ache over it, they cannot pretend not to know it, but they have no intention of turning back to their fathers. And that means repentance has not yet been given. — Douglas Wilson, reviewing The Shack. Evangelicals have lost fatherhood, because they…
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From Ennui to Angst
The pagan world crippled us with meaningless cycles. Now that the Jews rescued us from the fatalistic pagan circle and gave us a history that is going somewhere, the somewhere in the distance is what cripples now. It is meaning, of a sort, but meaning that is not doctrinally clear is just a vague foreboding…
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Conspiracy Theorists and Intelligent Design
1. The uncritical attribution of malignant design I know a man who is paranoid. I don’t mean he is sometimes anxious that others are out to get him, or that he is occasionally dramatic about threats. No, he is paranoid, which means he observes a phenomenon, and then projects onto the unseen backstage of that…