Category: Christian Doctrine
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A Response to My Is Sin a Fact?
Brian Bosse is not convinced by my Substack article, Is Sin a Fact? A Passage from Chesterton Examined. Brian writes, Your Argument Against Chesterton (1) If the existence of sin is a fact one can see in the street, then the existence of God is a fact one can see in the street. (2)…
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The Lewis Trilemma
Does it prove the divinity of Jesus? I argue that it doesn't at the top o' the Stack. People who think otherwise, Peter Kreeft for example, bluster. People love to bluster. Galen Strawson's rejection of theism is pure bluster.
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Body, Soul, Self
Tony Flood writes: Hard to imagine Hitchens at almost 73, had he lived. Great post, but I have a question. Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one's "true self"? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., "the man." The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God…
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The God Question and the Christian Proposition
A conversation between Alain Fikielkraut and Pierre Manent. Very French and very flabby, but here is an excerpt that I approve of (emphasis added): P.M. What is the nature of Islam’s challenge for us? And who is this “we” being challenged? The challenge lies in the fact that what is happening is that Islam is exerting…
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“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread”
Material bread or spiritual bread? Substack latest.
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Felicitas Theoretica et Visio Beata: Monasticism and Christianity
The bliss of the bios theoretikos as described by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics is the model for the Beatific Vision as described by Thomas Aquinas. The ultimate salvific state is a contemplative state. Monasticism is an institutional expression of this root commitment. The monk's life is decidedly biased toward the intellectual and the theoretical.…
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Ratzinger on the Resurrection of the Body
Substack latest. You will note that in my writings I use the gender-neutral 'man' and 'he.' It is important to stand in defense of the mother tongue. She is under vicious assault these days. You owe a lot to your mother; show her some respect. On Easter Sunday and on every day. Anyone who takes…
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Wittgenstein on Christianity
A Good Friday meditation. Substack latest. Last year's Good Friday Substack meditation.
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Another Theological Conundrum: Hypostatic Union and the Contingency of the Incarnation
In the immediately preceding theological thread, Dr. Caiati reminded me of Fr. Thomas Joseph White's The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology (CUA Press, 2017). So I cracked open my copy and found some notes from October 2018, one batch of which I will now turn into a weblog entry. 'Hypostatic Union' ". .…
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Doubting the Teachings of One’s Religion
I argued earlier that besides its salutary role in philosophy, doubt also has a salutary role to play in religion. But I left something out, and Vito Caiati caught it: I have been thinking about your recent post “A Comparison of the Roles of Doubt in Philosophy and Religion” and would like to pose a…
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A Christian Koan for Christmas Eve
From my Facebook page, three years ago, today. My writing is uneven in quality. But the Muse was with me below. ………………………….. Man is godlike and therefore proud. He becomes even more godlike when he humbles himself. The central thought of Christianity, true or not, is one so repellent to the natural human pride…
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Karl Barth, Divine Revelation, and Mystical Experience
"It [divine revelation] is the opening of a door that can only be unlocked from the inside." Quoted by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image Books, 1965, p. 10) from a Christmas sermon preached by Karl Barth in 1931. I am going to take this ball and run with it. Imagine someone…
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Kerouac’s Beat(ific) Visions and the Cross
A good essay by Joshua Hren at First Things. What Hren says is complemented by this entry of mine from 31 October 2010: The despairing section X of Book Thirteen of Vanity of Duluoz which I quoted yesterday is followed immediately by this: Yet I saw the cross just then when I closed my eyes after writing all this. …
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William Lane Craig . . .
. . . on the headwaters of the human race. A very intelligent article. I have had similar thoughts. Here is an excerpt from an entry dated 30 August 2011: But how can God create man in his image and likeness without interfering in the evolutionary processes which most of us believe are responsible for man's…