Category: Christian Doctrine
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Reader Considers Converting to Islam. Would Christian Unitarianism Satisfy his Scruples?
Here is the beginning of the letter he sent me: I've been considering converting to Islam.You've had a big part in this, though I know it won't please you to hear it. Your arguments against the coherency of the Incarnation are hard to get past. My arguments against the Chalcedonian, 'two-natures-one-person' theology of the Incarnation…
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Ash Wednesday
"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. How real can we…
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Another Note on Buddhism and Christianity
We feel intensely and care deeply. We are immersed in life and its passions and projects, its loves and its hates. But wisdom counsels detachment and withdrawal, mentally if not physically: one does not have to haul off to a monastery to cultivate detachment. Retreat into the serene and ataraxic can however be protracted unto…
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“And the Word was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us.” (John 1:14)
Let us meditate this Christmas morning on the sheer audacity of the idea that God would not only enter this world of time and misery, but come into it in the most humble manner possible . . . . Read the rest here. It is a 'sermon' you will not likely hear in any Catholic…
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Communism and Christianity
Communism is a 'religion' refuted by experience. It delivered not paradise, but the gulag and the torture chamber. Its attempted redemption by blood succeeded in spilling oceans of it but achieved no redemption. It is only the spilling of the God-Man's blood that can achieve the redemption of man. Man cannot save himself. That is…
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Postscript to Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation: Reply to Dr. Caiati
Vito Caiati writes, . . . while I see the wisdom in your assertion “no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of grace, a certain free granting ab extra,” I am troubled about the soteriological implications of such…
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The Christian View of Death and Immortality
Thanatology presupposes philosophical anthropology: what death is taken to be depends on what the human being is taken to be. Although Christianity certainly has affinities with Platonism, so much so that Nietzsche could with some justice speak of Christianity as Platonism for the people, the Christian view of man is in an important respect un-Platonic.…
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Christianity has civilized us . . .
. . . but it has also weakened us. Our virtues, which once were strengths, are now weaknesses. Some of our virtues have come to vitiate as much as some of our vices. We in the West no longer crucify malefactors or break them on the wheel. We now wring our hands, absurdly, over whether…
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Absurdistan: The Cross of Christ is Supposed to be an Argument against the Death Penalty!
From a German correspondent I learned about the theology blog Nachtgedanken, Night Thoughts. I agree entirely with the current post which begins: "In der Karfreitagspredigt sagt Bischof Ulrich Neymeyr: "Der Justizirrtum, dem auch Jesus zum Opfer gefallen ist, ist eines der schlagkräftigen Argumente gegen die Todesstrafe". Tagespost 19.4.2019. Diese bischöfliche Aussage evoziert eine Frage:…
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Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75: The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of iron; such is the hum an condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite…
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Self-Made Meaning is Unmeaning
One can bake bread, buy bread, or beg bread. Can one bake for oneself the bread of meaning? Or must one ask for it? (One cannot buy it.) Some say that the only meaning a life has is the meaning the liver of the life gives it. This is a mistake as I will argue…
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Meaning as Bread
As an addendum to yesterday's Platonizing entry on "Give us this day our daily bread," I draw upon Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trs. Foster and Miller, Ignatius Press, 1969, p. 73, orig. publ. in German in 1968: Meaning is the bread on which man, in the intrinsically human part of his being, subsists.
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David Horowitz on the War Against Christianity
David Horowitz argues in his new book "Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America," that secularists and leftists want to turn the nation into a godless, heathen society where religion has absolutely no role. Horowitz, who heads the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Los Angeles, is used to taking controversial positions. He is the…
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Is St. Paul an Anti-Natalist?
I wrote in Christian Anti-Natalism? (10 November 2017): Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist. Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the…