A Thinking Reed

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

Theology & Faith

  • Feminist conversion as a source of theological speech

    In part II of She Who Is, Elizabeth Johnson discusses the sources she’s going to use for her project of theological reconstruction, or as she puts it: “resources for emancipatory speech about God” (p. 61). These are women’s interpreted experience, the Bible, and classical theology. It’s hard not to be reminded of Hooker’s “three-legged stool” Read more

  • Tradition as a source for liberating speech about God

    Granted my theological reading is pretty spotty to begin with, but a particular hole I’ve been meaning to fill has been feminist theology. So, when I saw a copy of Elizabeth Johnson’s She Who Is at a local used bookstore I decided to pick it up–and I’m glad I did. Not only does Johnson make Read more

  • Hebblethwaite on natural and revealed morality

    In his book Christian Ethics in the Modern Age, British philosopher-theologian Brian Hebblethwaite offers a nice summary of what I tend to think of as the classic Christian understanding of the nature of ethics: Christians certainly believe that all goodness stems from God and reflects both God’s own nature and His will for man. But Read more

  • The Trinity as a model for human society?

    From Mark D. Chapman’s article, “The Social Doctrine of the Trinity: Some Problems“: In these various different discussions of the implications of the doctrine of the Trinity for life together in society, there is an implicit assumption that the picture of the relationships between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is able to function as Read more

  • (How) does Jesus reveal moral truth?

    It occurred to me after the last post that there might be a subset or version of the first view (God is necessary for us to know the difference between right and wrong) which has a stronger claim than I gave it credit for. That is the idea that moral truth is revealed in the Read more

  • Do we need God to be good?

    It’s often asserted, or assumed, that God is “necessary” for morality, not infrequently leading to furious argument about the relative virtues of believers and atheists. But there are several senses in which God might be related to morality, so it’s important to distinguish them: God is necessary for us to know the difference between right Read more

  • One more (at least) on pluralism

    Another thought occurred to me about John Hick’s pluralism hypothesis: that it risks introducing a moralistic distortion into religion. Since, for Hick, religion is primarily a practical rather than a cognitive enterprise (because the Real in itself eludes our cognitive abilities), the criteria by which he judges religion are primarily moral ones. Religions are vehicles Read more

  • Further thoughts on pluralism

    Thinking a bit more about John Hick’s pluralism, spurred on by some of the excellent comments on the last post, it does seem that my original worry about Hick’s position could be stated in a stronger form. My question was whether it’s necessary to believe in a tradition in a non-pluralist way (i.e., to believe Read more

  • Religious pluralism revisited

    One common criticism of the pluralistic view of religions–and one that I have found persuasive–is that it presupposes a “god’s eye” vantage point that seems to be ruled out by the theory itself. That is, asserting that all religions provide a partial perspective on the divine, seems to imply that the pluralist can discern clearly Read more

  • Addendum to previous post

    Something funky happened to that last post, and part of it got cut out. But in the version I originally wrote, I included on my list H. Richard Niebuhr’s Radical Monotheism and Western Culture. I posted a bit about it here. Read more