A Thinking Reed

  • Small government

    “On all issues but one, antebellum southerners stood for state’s rights and a weak federal government. The exception was the fugitive slave law of 1850, which gave the national government more power than any other law yet passed by Congress.” — James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 78

  • Literalism vs. inerrancy

    I’ve been reading The Scope and Authority of the Bible by biblical scholar James Barr, and in it he clarifies something I’ve been thinking for a while. Barr wrote a well-known book on fundamentalism, and one of the essays in Scope… deals with fundamentalism. The point Barr makes is that, contrary to what is often…

  • Was Jesus married? Does it matter?

    It looks like there’s some skepticism among scholars about the authenticity of the already much-discussed “Jesus’ wife” papyrus–said to be a fragment from a non-canonical Coptic gospel that has Jesus referring to “my wife” and saying that she will be a “disciple.” Much of yesterday’s breathless reporting on the papyrus centered around its potential to…

  • Schleiermacher’s twist on predestination

    At Experimental Theology, Richard Beck argues that all forms of predestination, no matter how their proponents try to nuance them, ultimately boil down to double predestination. “You’re either an Arminian or you believe in double predestination,” he concludes. But Beck has missed an important possibility here, it seems to me. What if God predestines everyone…

  • Romney vs. the 47%

    The big political news of the day, of course, is the video released by Mother Jones of Mitt Romney speaking to a room of wealthy donors in which he essentially wrote off half the American public as moochers who will never be convinced to take responsibility for their lives. Romney’s remarks are a version of…

  • Wesley on religious experience

    Theodore Runyon is a theologian, now retired, from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Among other things, he’s published a book on John Wesley’s theology (which I blogged about a bit a while back) as well as several articles on Wesley. In his book Exploring the Range of Theology, which collects articles he’s…

  • Baroness, “Take My Bones Away”

  • Schleiermacher on the dispensability of the cross and resurrectoin

    In The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher argues that, contrary to appearances, the cross and resurrection of Jesus aren’t actually essential to Christianity. His reasoning for this surprising conclusion is consistent with his overall method, but for that reason highlights some of the concerns that Christians of a more orthodox bent might have with it. For Schleiermacher,…

  • Francis Spufford’s speech to religion’s cultured despisers

    This essay from Francis Spufford has been getting flagged quite a bit in my little corner of the Internet. Spufford is an English author who writes mostly non-fiction (his recent book Red Plenty was the subject of a book event at Crooked Timber this summer). Spufford’s essay seems to be a summary of his new…

  • Schleiermacher vs. theistic evolutionism

    So-called theistic evolutionists sometimes distinguish themselves from creationists by saying that God used evolution to creation life on earth, rather than creating it directly through a special divine act. I’m generally sympathetic to this view, at least in the sense that I’m a theist who believes that evolution is the best account going of how…