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“Negative” theology is not enough
Experience with seminary students over several decades indicates that they turn surprisingly agnostic when the time comes to think about God, declaring that “the finite cannot comprehend the infinite,” so any ideas one might have about God are just as good as any others. Such agnosticism has its roots either in intellectual laziness or in…
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Von Balthasar’s hopeful almost-universalism
In Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”?, Hans Urs Von Balthasar takes as his starting point that the Bible contains “irreconcilable” statements on the ultimate destiny of humanity. There are passages that hold out the threat of everlasting punishment, but there are others that speak hopefully about the ultimate reconciliation or restoration of…
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Hans Urs Von Balthasar: the Rob Bell of his day
I started reading the great Catholic theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s “Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?”, and right off the bat what struck me is how similar the public controversy over Von Balthasar’s views was to the brouhaha over Rob Bell’s “Love Wins.” Obviously there are vast differences here. Von Balthasar was…
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Boston
The “what” and the “how” are awful, and no one seems to know much about the “who” and “why” at this point. Of course, that hasn’t stopped people from speculating. I recommend this post from Jesse Walker at Reason as an antidote to some of that. I lived in the Boston area (Somerville to be…
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Atonement as the restoration of human nature in Athanasius (and Anselm)
Fr. Aidan Kimel (who theo-blog veterans may remember as Al Kimel, an Epsicopal priest who used to run the blog Pontifications before converting to Catholicism–and now apparently to Eastern Orthodoxy) has been doing a series on St. Athanasius’s “On the Incarnation.” The latest installment looks at Athanasius’s understanding of the Atonement as the healing of…
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Rob Bell’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About God”
I think the book suffered a bit from not being as tightly focused as “Love Wins.” The earlier book could assume a fair bit of common ground, as it was tackling what is mainly an intra-Christian debate, but here Bell’s target audience seems to more explicitly be the skeptic, the seeker, and the “spiritual but…
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Idealism in twenty minutes
Keith Ward gives a concise overview and defense of metaphysical idealism: This lecture is essentially a summary of the argument from his 2010 book More Than Matter. The basic claim is that mind or consciousness is a fundamental component or aspect of reality, and it can’t be reduced to or explained exhaustively in material terms.…
A Thinking Reed 