A Thinking Reed

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

Theology & Faith

  • “Justice is giving humans their due as people in the image of God”

    Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, has a book out called Generous Justice, making the case that concern for the poor is a non-negotiable implication of the gospel and a matter of justice, not just charity. Christianity Today interviews him here. “It’s biblical,” Pastor Keller says, “that we owe the Read more

  • Friday links

    – The new(ish) blog Women in Theology has been quite active lately, with recent posts on John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas garnering a lot of discussion. – Scu at Critical Animal writes on books that have changed the way he thinks. And here’s the post that inspired his post. – Jeremy recently had a good Read more

  • Second thoughts on John Dominic Crossan

    I had put J. D. Crossan in a kind of mental “bad liberal” box and so had mostly avoided reading him. (By which I mean I thought of him as someone whose project was strictly one of “debunking” traditional Christian claims.) But then I read Crossan and Marcus Borg’s The First Paul and liked it Read more

  • Companions on the way

    I meant to link earlier to Jeremy’s helpful post on Elizabeth Johnson’s book on the saints, Friends of God and Prophets. Johnson argues for a reformed, “companion” model of the communion of saints, as contrasted with the more traditional “patronage” model. According to Johnson (per Jeremy’s summary; I haven’t read the book), just this kind Read more

  • A better hope

    In continuing to circle around the question of eschatology and look at it from different angles, I went back to Clark Williamson’s Way of Blessing, Way of Life. I wrote a short post on his eschatology here, but I thought it might be worth looking at it more in-depth. This is partly because I think Read more

  • For Reformation day

    “A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none, a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one. “It is clear then that to a Christian man his faith suffices for everything, and that he has no need of works for justification. But if Read more

  • Jesus and the end: what if he was “wrong”?

    In my post on Marcus Borg’s view of Jesus and eschatology, I asserted that if Jesus did expect an imminent supernatural in-breaking of some sort, then he was wrong, a conclusion that would disconcert many Christians. This might have been too categorical of a statement. In his book The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, Read more

  • Whose Jesus? Which eschatology?

    (With apologies to Alasdair MacIntyre.) I’m still reading Marcus Borg’s Jesus. In the scholarly arena, Borg is probably best known as a proponent of the “non-eschatological” or “non-apocalyptic” Jesus, and he addresses this controversy in chapter 9 of this book. In Jesus, Borg offers a refinement of terminology. Instead of “non-eschatological” or “non-apocalyptic,” he now Read more

  • I want to be a Pentecostal too

    Marvin offers a review of Allan Anderson’s book on global pentecostalism that really makes me want to read it. The essence of charismatic Christianity, according to Anderson (according to Marvin) isn’t speaking in tongues or some of the other trappings usually associated with pentecostalism, but rather “A shared conviction that the Holy Spirit can and Read more

  • Brian McLaren on the atonement

    I like this way of putting it: When people ask me about atonement these days, here’s what I often ask in reply: where do you primarily locate God on Good Friday? Is God primarily located with the Romans who are crucifying Jesus, or is God primarily located in the man on the cross, suffering at Read more