Category: Christian Doctrine
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Warning to Liberals: Beware of Undermining Christianity
Liberals who undermine Christianity undermine the foundations of their own values. Chief among them is the value of equality as enunciated in the American Declaration of Independence. As a matter of empirical fact, however, people are obviously not equal either as individuals or as groups. Equality-of-persons as presented in the Declaration is a normative principle…
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Physicalist Christology? Notes on Merricks
"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us . . . . (John 1:14) Physicalism is popular among philosophers these days. So it is no surprise that Christian philosophers are drawn to it as well, including those who subscribe to the central teaching that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity,…
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John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter
Seven Stanzas at Easter Make no mistake: if He rose at allit was as His body;if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the moleculesreknit, the amino acids rekindle,the Church will fall. It was not as the flowers,each soft Spring recurrent;it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddledeyes of the eleven apostles;it was…
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John Updike’s Christianity
Gerald R. McDermott (emphases added): In Updike’s religion, then, there are no commandments we are meant to keep except the obligation to accept what is: “Religion includes, as its enemies say, fatalism, an acceptance and consecration of what is.” Our only responsibility is to “appreciate” the great gift that life represents. He learned from Barth…
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More on the Question: Is Christianity Vain if not Historically True?
Just over the transom from Jacques: Enjoying your posts as always! Thanks for writing so regularly, at such a high level. Reading your posts on Wittgenstein on religion I have a few quick thoughts about religion (or Christianity specifically). When I first started reading Wittgenstein, I initially thought that he had in mind some very…
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An Easter Sunday Meditation: Wittgenstein Contra St. Paul
1 Corinthians 15:14: "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." (KJV) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, U. of Chicago Press, 1980, tr. Peter Winch, p. 32e, entry from 1937: Queer as it sounds: The historical accounts in the Gospels might, historically speaking, be demonstrably false…
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The Case for Christ
As cinema and story-telling, The Case for Christ leaves something to be desired. But if ideas are your thing, then this movie may hold your attention as it held mine. It will help if you are at least open to the possibility that Christ rose from the dead. The review in Christianity Today is worth…
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Platonism in One Case
The Christian is a Platonist about one man, Christ: he pre-exists both his conception and his birth. But there is no Platonism about any other human. The rest of us enjoy no Platonic pre-existence. We are literally nothing until we are conceived. One could say that orthodox Christians are anthropological exceptionalists with respect to one…
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The Dilemma of Sebastian Rodrigues in Endo’s Silence: Ethical or Merely Psychological?
This entry assumes familiarity with the story recounted by Shusaku Endo in his novel, Silence. Philip L. Quinn's "Tragic Dilemmas, Suffering Love, and Christian Life" (The Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 17, no. 1, Spring 1989, 151-183) is the best discussion of the central themes of the novel I have read. I thank Vlastimil Vohanka…
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Luke 2:21: Can the Not-Yet-Existent be Named?
Luke 2:21 (NIV): On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise the child, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he was conceived. (emphasis added) This New Testament passage implies that before a certain human individual came into existence, he was named, and therefore could be named. The implication…
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Scorsese’s Silence
A review by Brad Miner. Excerpt: As the book reaches its climax, Rodrigues feels the sand giving way beneath him: From the deepest core of my being yet another voice made itself heard in a whisper. Supposing God does not exist. . . . This was a frightening fancy. . . .What an absurd drama…
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Two Different Christmas Day Meditations on the Incarnation
Last Year's: "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, inter faeces et urinam nascimur, born…
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Forgiveness
Suppose you are father of a daughter who has been brutally raped. The rapist is apprehended, tried, and found guilty. Suppose further than the man convicted really is guilty as charged and pays the penalty prescribed by the law, and that the penalty is a just one (the penalty that justice demands, as I would…
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The Horror of Death and its Cure
There is dying, there is being dead, and there is the momentary transition from the one to the other. While we rightly fear the suffering and indignity of dying, especially if the process is drawn out over weeks or months, it is the anticipation of the moment of death that some of us find horrifying.…
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Religious Liberty and a Brooks Boner
The Op-Ed pages of The New York Times are piss-poor to be sure, but Ross Douthat and David Brooks are sometimes worth reading. But the following from Brooks (28 October) is singularly boneheaded although the opening sentence is exactly right: The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and…