Before he wrote on religious ceremonies, Jean Frederic Bernard wrote a treatise on the State of Man in Original Sin , which reworked the notorious On Original Sin (1678) written by Adrianus van Beverland. Beverland had argued that the fall story of Genesis 3 was an allegory for the discovery of . . . . Continue Reading »
The title tells the main story that Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt want to tell: The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World . The book in question was a seven-volume illustrated encyclopedia of religious practices throughout . . . . Continue Reading »
Grotius ( Defensio Fidei Catholoicae: De Satisfactione Christi Adversus Faustum Socinum Senensem, 7.4) defines wrath as the desire to inflict punishment, and he insists that God is wrathful toward sin and sinners, and that this wrath must be satisfied by the infliction of punishment if sinners are . . . . Continue Reading »
Grotius ( Defensio Fidei Catholoicae: De Satisfactione Christi Adversus Faustum Socinum Senensem , 4.10) insists that punishment of one for the “delict” of another is just, and is customary among many peoples, ancient and modern. Part of his argument turns the question upside down to . . . . Continue Reading »
Sovereign rulers, Grotius argues ( Defensio Fidei Catholoicae: De Satisfactione Christi Adversus Faustum Socinum Senensem , 3.12) are free to relax certain laws and punishments if they have sufficient reasons to do so. Because of the fall God has more than sufficient reasons to relax the law that . . . . Continue Reading »
Biblical and Hellenistic philosophical monotheism were unified in their rejection of myth and polytheism. But the direction of their critique was different. For Plato and Platonism, the world of sensible things and change is a distraction: “Physical sensations and poetical imitations of them . . . . Continue Reading »
For Trinitarian theology, the Father, Son, and Spirit who act in the events recounted in the gospel are “real, distinct agents, not signs of something else.” Trinitarianism denies that “the saving action that transpires among the three is not some kind of symbol pointing to . . . . Continue Reading »
For the church fathers, God’s impassibility was substantial. It mean “that God is the One Nature, simple and uncompounded, that cannot morph, so to say, into some other substance or disintegrate into some more basic elements,” and this involved “freedom from . . . . Continue Reading »
Gerald Hiestand of the Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology examines Paul’s teaching on sexual idolatry at the Trinity House site. . . . . Continue Reading »
In his 2010 Divine Complexity: The Rise of Creedal Christianity , Paul Hinlicky presents a nuanced summary of both the commonalities and the differences between Middle Platonism and early Christian thought. Citing C.J. De Vogel, he lists several shared assumptions: visible things don’t exist . . . . Continue Reading »
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