A Thinking Reed

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

Theology & Faith

  • Church for earthlings

    Ecclesiology–or the doctrine of the church–is, for my money, one of the duller areas of Christian theology. And when it doesn’t engage in excessive navel-gazing and hair-splitting, it can be a source of ugly Christian triumphalism. In recent theology, the “ecclesial turn” has often upheld “the church” as the cure-all for everything that supposedly ails Read more

  • The victory of suffering love

    I recently came across this very good talk from Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (author of several well-regarded books on Eastern Orthodox Christianity) on “Salvation in Christ.” Metropolitan Ware offers four questions we should ask when evaluating any proposed model of the Atonement: Does it envisage a change in God or us? Does it separate Christ from Read more

  • Affirming Christianity is authentic Christianity

    Since this is pride month and since many Christian churches continue to wrestle with the full inclusion of LGBTQ people (including the denomination I’m currently affiliated with), maybe it’s worth sharing how I came to arrive at an “open and affirming” stance. Though I’m probably an atypical case in a lot of ways. I don’t Read more

  • The Luther Option

    If instead, we renew our focus on those Christian possessions shared by all, perhaps we can understand both our faith and each other better. If we turn away from an ideal Christianity to be preserved from the past or built in the future, perhaps we can see better what Christians already do and already are. Read more

  • Will Marcion win after all?

    In his recent book, Princeton Theological Seminary professor Brent Strawn makes a provocative case that American Christians are in imminent danger of losing the Old Testament—and with it much of the substance of Christian faith. Drawing on a variety of evidence, Strawn argues that we are losing our grip on the OT, making it comparable Read more

  • Tom Paine, the Bible and wealth redistribution

    I enjoyed this interview with University of Michigan philosopher Elizabeth Anderson on how workplaces effectively function as “private governments” and often act in oppressive ways toward their employees. That lead me to this piece by Anderson on Tom Paine as an early theorist of social insurance. In Anderson’s telling, Paine was responding to revolutionary communist Read more

  • Is penal substitutionary atonement the “core of Christian faith”?

    According to this story, the Southern Baptist Convention just adopted a resolution at its annual meeting that re-affirms the “penal substitutionary” view of Christ’s atonement. This was passed in the face of what were described as efforts to “weaken” the doctrine. Proponents of PSA (penal substitutionary atonement)–the view that on the cross God was punishing Read more

  • The cross as sacrifice and gift

    In chapter two of his small book on the cross and resurrection (see previous post), Rowan Williams turns to the important but controversial motif of sacrifice. He reminds us that “there is no pre-cross Christianity”: that is, as far as we can tell, there was no early Christianity that regarded Jesus only as a charismatic Read more

  • The cross as a sign of freedom

    Here is a divine love that cannot be defeated by violence: we do our worst, and we still fail to put God off. We reject, exclude and murder the one who bears the love of God in his words and work, and that love continues to do exactly what it always did. The Jesus who Read more

  • (Why) does the debate about divine (im)passibility matter?

    I’ve spent a fair bit of time reading up on the debate over whether God can be said to suffer, and if so in what sense. I haven’t come to any firm conclusions about this, but I think it’s helpful to understand what religious commitments may motivate the debate. In particular, this is not just Read more