A Thinking Reed

  • Semi-hiatus

    As readers of my Twitter feed may be aware, my wife gave birth to a healthy and beautiful baby boy last Thursday morning. We’re extremely happy (and tired, etc.). However, a foreseeable, if unintended, side-effect of the new addition is less time (and energy) for blogging. So expect few if any posts for the next…

  • Liberals aren’t sexual relativists

    In an article that otherwise makes some good points about conservatives’ “populist” defense of junk food, Rod Dreher just can’t resist taking a swipe at a time-honored liberal strawman: For conservatives, it may be revealing to compare the defensiveness with which many of us discuss what we do in the dining room to the defensiveness…

  • How “liberal” is Schleiermacher?

    Before I started reading him, I had some preconceptions about Schleiermacher, owing in large part to his reputation as the father of “liberal” theology. But the more I read him, the more convinced I am that those preconceptions were wrong. First, I had assumed that Schleiermacher built his theology on the foundation of a “generic,”…

  • The Civil Wars, “From this Valley”

  • Barth on universalism and the fear of antinomianism

    One question should for a moment be asked, in view of the “danger” with which one may see this concept [i.e., universalism] gradually surrounded. What of the “danger” of the eternally skeptical-critical theologian who is ever and again suspiciously questioning, because fundamentally always legalistic and therefore in the main morosely gloomy? Is not his presence…

  • The Walkmen, “Heaven”

    From the album of the same name.

  • Speaking of equality…

    From this really interesting interview with philosopher Elizabeth Anderson: The idea that human beings are fundamentally equals from a moral point of view is ancient. I suspect it can be traced all the way back to the origins of monotheism, in the idea that we are all equally creatures of God, all made in God’s…

  • A quick note on sexual equality in the church

    Those who follow such things know that there’s an ongoing debate in the evangelical world between “egalitarians” and “complementarians.” As you might guess, the former believe that men and women are equal–at least in the sense relevant to things like church leadership, while the latter maintain that men and women have “complementary” roles–with women playing…

  • Miracles according to Schleiermacher

    Schleiermacher treats miracles in part 1, section 1 of The Christian Faith under the more general heading of God’s creation and preservation of the world. He argues that the “interdependence” of finite beings in the world is fully compatible with each thing’s dependence on God at each moment of its existence. God is not one…

  • Schleiermacher on the historicity of the creation stories

    In the part in The Christian Faith on creation and preservation, Schleiermacher takes a surprisingly (to me, anyway) modern-seeming approach to the biblical creation stories. He argues that the doctrine of creation is intended to safeguard two points: (1) that everything that exists other than God is ultimately dependent on God and (2) that God was…