Theology
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Marvin argues that a doctrine of divine determinism–that everything that happens, even apparently horrible things like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, is an expression of God’s will–is actually a more comforting doctrine than people sometimes give it credit for: If this sounds harsh, and as I said last week, I am against harshness as Read more
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John Haught concludes Making Sense of Evolution with some reflections on how an evolutionary picture of the world should inform–and even transform–our view of God. As we’ve seen, Haught thinks that evolutionary science reveals a creation that is unfinished and in process, analogous to an unfolding drama rather than a perfectly engineered machine. And how Read more
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Though he doesn’t use the same language, John Haught argues, in effect, that Intelligent Design is an example of what Lutherans call the “theology of glory” because it purports to discern God in obvious and outward ways (in this case, by finding “scientific” evidence of design in nature). For a theology of the cross, by Read more
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As we saw earlier, John Haught thinks it’s something of a category mistake to oppose natural selection to divine action, as though these were explanations operating on the same causal level. As he develops his theology of evolution, Haught emphasizes that a major source of this confusion is thinking of God as a “designer.” This Read more
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I’m reading Catholic theologian John Haught’s Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life. Haught is a well-known advocate of “theistic evolution” and argues that theology hasn’t adequately come to grips with Darwin’s impact on our understanding of the world, which he thinks should have serious repercussions on key theological concepts. Theistic Read more
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One argument you sometimes hear for the necessity of a “historical” fall and a “historical” Adam and Eve goes like this: if there was no historical first couple and fall into sin, then we are in no need of a savior and therefore the entire gospel loses its raison d’etre. This seems odd to me. Read more
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Christopher makes some important points here, offering a corrective, I think, to some of the things I said here. For Christians, marriage isn’t just about “happiness,” but as Christopher rightly points out, it’s also a way of living out our discipleship. Or in Lutheran terms, it’s a vocation that allows us to learn to love Read more
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Michael Westmoreland-White points to the website and blog of Ted Grimsrud, a professor of theology and religion at Eastern Mennonite University. Both sites focus on Christian pacifism in the Anabaptist tradition, particularly as represented by John Howard Yoder. Prof. Grimsrud also has a series of essays on his site looking at core Christian doctrines. I Read more
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Readers may be interested in this new(ish) blog: The Moral Mindfield. The about page says that it is “intended as an open forum for the discussion of the ethical dimensions of society and culture. …informed by philosophy, theology, and social theory, as well as other academic disciplines.” If I’ve got this right, the contributers are Read more
A Thinking Reed 