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 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 »
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 »
In the NYRB, Edward Mendelson suggests that there is a little zone of Protestant freedom within the controlled Papal structures of Apple: “AppleScript is protestant with a lower-case ‘p,’ as iOS and much of OS X is catholic with a lower-case ‘c.’ Like the Protestantism . . . . Continue Reading »
Christopher Ash argues in Married for God: Making Your Marriage the Best it Can be (57-8) that it is a “false choice” to ask whether we serve God or have children: “We serve God by having children.” For most moms, “what they do as parents will prove more significant in . . . . Continue Reading »
Bombaro ( Jonathan Edwardss Vision of Reality: The Relationship of God to the World, Redemption History, and the Reprobate , 91-2) quotes these passages from Edwards Micellanies indicating that God would have unrealized attributes if He had not created the world: “There are many of the divine . . . . Continue Reading »
Daniel Stanley muses on the fire of God at the Trinity House site. . . . . Continue Reading »
“Ambition” doesn’t appear in the Geneva Bible, but by William Casey King’s count ( Ambition, A History: From Vice to Virtue ) it appears seventy-six times in the notes to that Bible. Almost all of the references are negative. In his NYRB review of King’s book, David . . . . Continue Reading »
Discussing Alan Wolfe’s Political Evil: What It Is and How to Combat It in Books and Culture , Eric Miller describes and gives cautious approval to Wolfe’s “quasi-theological turn.” Wolfe now recognizes that “human beings, far from being free spirits standing to . . . . Continue Reading »
I reflect on the role that dispensational theology has played in US Middle East policy at the Trinity House site. . . . . Continue Reading »
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