Category: Theology
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Who’s Hell Bound?
Just over the transom from Derwood: Help me understand something. When Jesus died, the vast percentage of humanity had and would never hear of the Jewish messiah/god. True. And that would seem to include all sorts of righteous Old Testament individuals, including Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Surely, the latter three are not in hell. As…
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The Theological Virtue of Hope
RCC Catechism: 1817. Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit. Now listen to Pope Leo: The pontiff [Leo] said…
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“My Kingdom is not of this World”
Thus Jesus to Pilate at John 18:36. What does 'this world' refer to? In the "Our Father" we pray: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Reading these two texts side-by-side one might conclude that God's kingdom is to be realized on earth and not in a purely…
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Back to Inerrancy: A Note on Vanhoozer
I have been doing my level best as time permits to get up to speed on inerrancy as understood by evangelical Protestants. I have a long way to go. Today I preach on a text from Kevin J. Vanhoozer. I will examine just one sentence of his in his contribution to Five Views of Biblical…
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Lonergan, Sproul, Bahnsen
A tip of the hat to Tony Flood for supplying me with the following important documents: Bernard Lonergan, Religion: The Answer is the Question R. C. Sproul and Greg Bahnsen Debate (full transcript) I had asked Tony whether he had a copy of Lonergan's Method in Theology he was willing to part with. Here is…
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How Christian is the Doctrine of Hell?
The traditional doctrine of hell appears to be a consequence of two assumptions, the first of which is arguably unbiblical. Geddes MacGregor: ". . . the doctrine of hell, with its attendant horrors, is intended as the logical development of the notion that, since man is intrinsically immortal, and some men turn out badly, they…
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On Anselmian or ‘Perfect Being’ Theology
Tom O. writes, I was wondering if you have time to weigh in on the following problem. I take it you subscribe to perfect being theology as a constraint on our theorizing about God’s nature. For example, you write, “God is the absolute, and no absolute worth its salt is a contingent being. No absolute just…
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“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread”
Physical bread or meta-physical bread? Top o' the Stack.
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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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Physicalist Christology?
Notes on Merricks. Substack latest.
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On Climate ‘Theology’
and the secularization of religious terminology. Top o' the Stack
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John Henry Newman and the Problem of Private Judgment
Onsi A. Kamel (First Things, October 2019): The issue of ecclesiastical authority was trickier for me. I recognized the absurdity of a twenty-year-old presuming to adjudicate claims about the Scriptures and two thousand years of history. Newman’s arguments against private judgment therefore had a prima facie plausibility for me. In his Apologia, Newman argues that…
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Brandon on Nemes on Orthodoxy and Heresy
Just over the transom from Steven Nemes: My book, Orthodoxy and Heresy, was recently published in the Cambridge Elements series by Cambridge University Press. Brandon of the Siris blog recently wrote a post responding to it with an objection. I have also replied to his objection in the comments. You might be interested. I remember Brandon…