A Thinking Reed

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

Theology & Faith

  • A note on Christ and culture

    Derek has a convincing piece at Episcopal Cafe arguing that it’s simplistic to see “liberals” (specifically, those who support things like women’s ordination and same-sex marriage) as simply going with the cultural flow while “conservatives” are upholding timeless standards of biblical morality. Using H. R. Niebuhr’s typology from his classic Christ and Culture, he points Read more

  • Judgment and weakness

    Judgment is the time when God finally brings in the verdict. The question, then, is not how one balances off mercy and judgment, but for whom is judgment mercy and for whom is it threatening doom. For God’s people God’s judgment is salvation. But who are God’s people? Is it not consistently true in the Read more

  • Stendahl’s rules

    Krister Stendahl was a Swedish Lutheran theologian, New Testament scholar, and ultimately a bishop of the Church of Sweden. He’s probably best known for arguing that St. Paul’s letters were responding to a specific context–namely the relationship between Jews and Gentiles and his mission to the latter. According to Stendahl, much Western theology (Lutheran in Read more

  • Jews, Christians, and a “two-poled” eschatology

    I’ve read more than one work of theology that attempted to explain the rejection of Jesus’ messiah-hood by the majority of Jews like this: Jews expectated the messiah to be a nationalist–even military–leader who would liberate them from Roman oppression, but Jesus was a different kind of messiah, a “spiritual” one who came to liberate Read more

  • A God of life

    The God of the Bible creates, re-creates, and ultimately redeems life. This God, whatever the other so-called “gods” might be like, loves life, rejoices in it, is concerned about it, not only creates it for the purpose of blessing it, but saves it, and in between discloses to God’s covenanted people the way of life Read more

  • A story of blessing

    Clark Williamson’s systematic theology Way of Blessing, Way of Life is less focused on Jewish-Christian relations than his earlier work A Guest in the House of Israel (which I blogged about previously), but the project of re-connecting Christianity to its Jewish roots is still a major concern. One point Williamson makes is that the way Read more

  • Clark Williamson on revelation

    God is the proper subject of revelation, God’s self in God’s being and works. In revelation, God reveals God’s self and we are dependent on God’s revelation of God’s self for our knowledge of God. All human efforts to gain knowledge of God by independent inquiry are fruitless (1 Cor. 1:21: “The world did not Read more

  • CotC on Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood

    Elliot at Claw of the Conciliator seems poised to return to at least semi-regular blogging (or so we can hope!). The other day he had a good post on Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood, the second book in what I believe is supposed to be a projected trilogy about a world of bioengineering and Read more

  • An example of the wrong approach to other religions

    I don’t mean to pick on this blog in particular, but this post exemplifies an all-too-common tendency of Christians to put an apologetic slant on their approach to non-Christian religions. The post purports to offer five reasons why “a thoughtful person would start their religious quest with Christianity,” and in a relatively short space it Read more

  • Dog bites man, John Milbank stirs up controversy

    John Milbank of “Radical Orthodoxy” fame always seems able to stir up controversy in the theo-blogosphere. The latest hullabaloo stems from an essay Milbank wrote for an Australian website that seems to endorse a romantic nostalgia for western colonialism (or as he puts it, “the lamentably premature collapse of the Western colonial empires”). That, and Read more