A Thinking Reed

  • Speak rightly of God

    I have one or two more posts on Williamson’s Guest in the House of Israel in the works, but if you’re interested in what I’ve been writing about so far you might want to check out this article–Speak Rightly of God: Clark M. Williamson as a Church Theologian–which provides an overview of his work. I…

  • Israel and the church: co-witnesses to the love and kingdom of God

    I’m not going to blog exhaustively about the remaining chapters in Clark Williamson’s A Guest in the House of Israel, where he applies the insights of a post-Holocaust theology to various topics (covenant, scripture, Christology, doctrine of God) with interesting results. What I thought I’d do instead is take a look at one area–the doctrine…

  • The Crusades, Fox News edition

    This would seem to tell you all you really need to know about Rodney Stark’s God’s Batallions: The Case for the Crusades: Clearly this is not the politically correct version of the Crusades, and that is fine: there is little that was politically correct about the Crusades in the first place. The difficulty I have…

  • By what authority?

    After surveying the issue of anti-Judaism in Christian theology, Clark Williamson proposes some criteria for a post-Holocaust theology: – Beware of unchanged “pre-Shoah” theological statements (i.e., we need to apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to traditional formulations). – Do theology in conversation with Jews. – Say nothing that could not be said “in the presence…

  • What is Christian anti-Judaism?

    Brandon points out in a comment to this post that I haven’t really defined what Williamson means by “anti-Judaism.” So here goes. First, it’s distinguishable from, though obviously related to, anti-Semitism. Anti-Judaism refers more broadly to the notion that Christianity is superior to, completes, and/or replaces Judaism as an ongoing religious enterprise. Williamson’s argument is…

  • Friday Metal: I’m old edition

    As the metal blog Invisible Oranges points out, Anthrax’s seminal album Persistence of Time turns 20 tomorrow. This was one of my very favorite albums when I was an angsty 15-year old, and it represents Joey Belladonna-era Anthrax at the height of its powers. (John Bush-era Anthrax still remains underrated in my book, though.) Anyway,…

  • Christianity’s constitutive anti-Judaism

    One of the most troubling things about reading Clark Williamson’s A Guest in the House of Israel is realizing that anti-Judaism isn’t just some anomalous bug of Christianity that can easily be tossed out. It’s more or less a constitutive feature of the patristic-medieval-Reformation-modern Christian consensus. As Christianity gradually emerged as a separate religion, the…

  • Anti-Judaism as works-righteousness

    The claim that Jews lost the covenant because they were not worthy of it is simply works-righteousness. Works-righteousness takes a gift provided by the free and unconditional grace of God and turns it into a condition apart from which God is not free to be gracious. Works-righteousness has nothing to do with an entirely different…

  • Brian McLaren: Conversations on Being a Heretic

    I’ve never read anything by Brian McLaren, and I get the feeling I’d disagree with him about a fair number of things, but this interview made me like him. I get the impression that the guy has to put up with a lot of b.s. from self-styled heresy-hunters. Brian McLaren: Conversations on Being a Heretic,…

  • Whitehead on value and subjectivity

    A quick addendum to the process theology post: I decided I was interested in finding out a bit more about Whitehead’s theory of value because of the role value plays in his metaphysics, and – lo and behold! – there’s an article by John Cobb called “Whitehead’s Theory of Value.” As a bonus, the first…