Category: Theo-logical Speculation
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The One Man Who Pre-Exists his Birth
Christianity is curiously Platonistic about Christ: he is the one man who pre-exists his conception and birth. "Before Abraham was, I am." (John 8:58) But no such Platonism about any other human, not even Mary, Theotokos (God-bearer). If, as Chalcedonian orthodoxy has it, Jesus Christ is fully man and fully God, then he is man…
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A Theological Speculation
At death the mists of self-deception will dissipate and we will see ourselves as we are and as we were with utter clarity. We will judge ourselves! God will not judge us directly. God will judge our judgment, whether by way of ratification or rejection.
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A Theory of Hell
The 'pleasures' of hell explained over at Substack.
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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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Thomism and Husserlian Phenomenology: Combinable?
Over the phone the other night, Steven Nemes told me that his project is to synthesize Thomism and phenomenology. I expressed some skepticism. Here are my reasons. Part I: Methodological Incompatibility Essential to Thomism is the belief that the existence of God can be proven a posteriori by human reason unaided by divine revelation. Thus…
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Why There Has to be Hell
Here is an amateur theological speculation. Suppose a rebellious nature such as Bertrand Russell or Jean-Paul Sartre or Christopher Hitchens finds himself in the divine presence and yet continues to refuse to acknowledge reality, which includes the rebel's creature status. Hitchens, or whoever, continues to assert himself madly with Luciferian pride and egomania against the…
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A Theory of Hell
The spiritually immature have spiritually immature conceptions of man and God, heaven and hell. If you think of man as just a physical being, then, if you think of God at all, you will most likely think of him as a physical being, as a sort of Man Writ Large, or Big Guy in the…
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A Philosopher’s Sign of the Cross
In the name of the Principle, and of its principal Exemplar and Expression, and of the dialectical Unity of the Two.* "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Secundum Ioannem 1, Prologus.…