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Inerrancy versus sufficiency
In a post yesterday, Daniel Silliman quoted historian Molly Worthen arguing that biblical “inerrancy” became an entrenched position among evangelical Christians only when it seemed necessary to shore up beliefs that were under attack by theological modernists. Prior to that, evangelicals held a variety of views on the inspiration of the Bible. He specifically mentions…
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To effect an intellectual revolution
This was the perfect medium for changing the way most Americans thought about the nation’s founding acts. Lincoln does not argue law or history, as Daniel Webster did. He makes history. He does not come to present a theory, but to impose a symbol, one tested in experience and appealing to national values, with an…
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“The Night of the Doctor”
This is a cool “mini-episode” leading in to the upcoming Doctor Who 50th anniversary special, “The Day of the Doctor.” It marks the return of Paul McGann as the eighth Doctor, who’s only appeared on screen one other time–in a made-for-TV movie from the 90s that was meant to revive the franchise for an American…
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Utilitarianism as “moral Esperanto”?
The Atlantic‘s Robert Wright has a thought-provoking review of Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. Greene used scans of people’s brains to examine their responses to the famous (famous by the standards of professional philosophy, anyway) “trolley problem” thought-experiment. In the thought-experiment, people are asked whether they would…
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Johnny Cash, “One of These Days I’m Gonna Sit Down and Talk to Paul”
I sometimes wonder what the people who were first exposed to Johnny Cash via his angsty late-90s output (the “Hurt” video, etc.) think of his super-earnest religious songs. Personally, I love it all.
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Paul Tillich for Reformation Day
On “justification by grace through faith”: A word must be said about the expression “Justification by grace through faith.” It is often used in the abbreviated form of “Justification by faith.” But this is extremely misleading, for it gives the impression that faith is an act of man by which he merits Justification. This is…
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Keith Ward on creation and the (social) Trinity
Keith Ward’s Religion and Creation (RC) is part of his multi-volume “comparative theology.” Its goal is to develop a contemporary Christian theology in genuine conversation with both modern science and other religious traditions. The focus of RC is the doctrine of God. Ward argues that recent representative figures from four major religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity,…
