A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

John Polkinghorne

  • Kenosis and pleroma

    I mentioned in a previous post that I’d been reading the volume The Work of Love—a collection of essays edited by John Polkinghorne that explore the idea of divine “kenosis” or self-limitation. Keith Ward, in his essay “Cosmos and Kenosis,” provides what I think is a helpful nuance to the concept of kenosis. He notes Read more

  • Nature’s “transparent rational beauty”

    The kinds of considerations I was discussing in the last post are very similar to those that physicist-priest John Polkinghorne offered as part of a “modest” natural theology in his book Belief in God in an Age of Science. I posted on this several years back, but here’s the relevant portion of the post reproduced: Read more

  • Resurrection and Docetism

    People sometimes argue against “spiritual” interpretations of the Resurrection of Jesus on the grounds that they are “Docetic”–that is, they deny the full reality of the Incarnation after the fashion of the ancient heresy of Docetism, which said that Jesus only appeared to be fully human. Specifically, it held that Jesus’ body was an illusion Read more

  • Friday links

    –Augustinian and Pelagian software. –A John Polkinghorne lecture on science and religion. –Batman as plutocrat. –Korn and Limp Bizkit: the soundtrack to nihilism. –Martha Nussbaum on John Stuart Mill: between Bentham and Aristotle. –The disconnect between the science and economics of climate change. –Peter Berger, who describes himself as a political conservative and a theological Read more

  • “Reason” vs. reasons

    I want to zero in further on one small part of the John Polkinghorne interview excerpted below: I think that the fundamental question about something, whether science or religion, is not, “Is it reasonable?” as if we know beforehand what is reasonable, or what shape rationality has. The better question is, “What makes you think Read more

  • Proof vs. “motivated belief”

    I liked this interview with physicist/Anglican priest John Polkinghorne. In particular, his distinction between proving a belief and having a belief that is well motivated is worth highlighting: Is it important to be able to prove the existence of God? Well, I don’t think it’s possible to prove the existence of God. There are many Read more

  • 2008: The year in book blogging

    I’m not going to provide a best books of the year list, but here’s a sampling of those that got their hooks into me enough to generate some more or less in-depth blogging (needless to say, most of these weren’t published in 2008): Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power “Empire of dysfunction” Evelyn Pluhar, Beyond Read more

  • The end of the world as we know it (6): animals

    (Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) Reflection on the ultimate destiny of animals has not been a central feature of Christian thinking about the eschaton. Most theology in general has been relentlessly anthropocentric, and eschatology as a general rule is no different. This is perhaps especially true of post-Enlightenment theology which, influenced by Cartesian Read more

  • The end of the world as we know it (5): New creation

    At the end of the previous post I wrote that Polkinghorne sees embodiment as essential to what it means to be human, partly because of the interrelatedness that is an intrinsic feature of all things. A self existing in isolation is, if not a contradiction in terms, at least living an extremely diminished and attenuated Read more

  • The end of the world as we know it (4): Human nature

    As we’ve seen, Polkinghorne is developing an eschatological vision that takes the findings of modern cosmology seriously, but is consonant with the deepest insights of the biblical tradition. The key principles are: that any hope for life beyond this world must be rooted in God’s faithfulness and that the shape of this hope will be Read more