Theology & Faith
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Christianity Today reported that the Presbyterian Church (USA) rejected “In Christ Alone”–a popular contemporary hymn–from its new hymnal because it mentions the wrath of God. Here are the offending lines: In Christ alone! who took on flesh Fulness of God in helpless babe! This gift of love and righteousness Scorned by the ones he came Read more
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The church as the real content of the gospel, its glory the boundless manifestation of the heavenly Lord, sharing in it being identical with sharing in Christ and his dominion, his qualities being communicable to it–we know that message. It has lasted for two thousand years, has fascinated Protestantism, too, and is today the main Read more
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According to the New York Times, after a period when it was more fashionable to study relatively marginalized religious movements like evangelicalism and Mormonism, historians are turning their attention back to liberal mainline Protestantism. One of the more surprising arguments, made by David Hollinger, is that the legacy of the mainline may be deeper and Read more
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Men who are strongly of the fact-loving temperament, you may remember me to have said, are liable to be kept at a distance by the small sympathy with facts which that philosophy from the present-day fashion of idealism offers them. It is far too intellectualistic. Old fashioned theism was bad enough, with its notion of Read more
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This discussion on religion with heavy-duty philosophers Hilary Putnam and Alvin Plantinga is from way back in 2000, but I found it well worth a listen. Somewhat ironically–considering that Putnam is Jewish and Plantinga is a Christian–I found myself more sympathetic to Putnam’s overall approach. I’m not nearly as familiar with his work, but the Read more
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Since we’ve been debating in the comments to this post just what Lewis was trying to accomplish with his trilemma argument, I thought it might be worth walking through the relevant passages in Mere Christianity step-by-step. It’s worth recalling that for all the attention it’s received, the argument only takes up somewhere in the neighborhood Read more
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Alan Jacobs takes issue with Anthony Kenny’s discussion of C. S. Lewis’s famous “trilemma” argument in Mere Christianity for the divinity of Jesus. Here’s Kenny: One line of argument he made popular went like this. Jesus said that he was God. Jesus was neither a deceiver nor deceived. Therefore Jesus was indeed God. Mocking the Read more
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During my vacation I read James Oakes’ The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. Oakes tells the story of how the radical abolitionist Douglass and the temperamental conservative Lincoln converged on a brand of antislavery politics that eventually resulted in the emancipation of America’s millions of slaves Read more
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Methodist and other churches remember today as the anniversary of John Wesley’s “Aldersgate Experience.” Richard Hall at Connexions provides some of the background here. Essentially, Wesley reported having a vivid experience of assurance in his own salvation when hearing a reading from Luther’s Preface to Romans. While this has sometimes been described as Wesley’s “conversion Read more
A Thinking Reed 