Baillie quotes the opening lines of Rousseau’s Confessions , and notes that it, like Descartes’s cogito, is an “effort to avert attention from what Girard calls mimetic desire, the elimination of which is tantamount to the rejection of Christian anthropology. Rousseau begins his Confessions not with a prayer, but with an assertion, and what he asserts is precisely the repudiation of mimesis . . . . Of course, the claim that he has no predecessors is odd, even comically odd,... Read more
Gil Baillie, working in a Girardian framework, suggests that the claim that man is made in the image of God means “this creature can only fulfill its destiny by becoming like someone else. So counterinstinctual and counterintuitive is such a thing, that the likelihood of this creature actually fulfilling such a destiny would be slim, indeed, unless the creature were somehow endowed with a desire to do so, a desire equally counterinstinctual and counterintuitive, a desire to be itself by... Read more
Vitz suggests that postmodern thought has been largely an act of “creative destruction” serving as an “expose, in the best sense of the term.” The result is “a much large intellectual framework within which everyone, including Christians, can function. It provides a much bigger framework than that which existed fifty or a hundred years ago when the enlightenment rationalistic understanding of life was all that was seriously accepted. Retrospectively, the modern worldview can now be seen as a much narrower... Read more
Paul Vitz describes the modern self this way: “The modern self is characterized by such things as freedom and autonomy, by a strong will, and by the presumption that the self is self-created by the will, operating freely in its construction. The self is assumed to be strong, capable, and above all coherent; it is also largely conscious and heavenly indebted to reason or at least to reasonableness.” Among the criticisms that have been lodged against this self are: “the... Read more
Many Christians find Lyotard’s claim that postmodernity is incredulity toward metanarratives directly contrary to Christian faith, but James KA Smith offers an interpretation of Lyotard’s that is not hostile to Christianity. For Lyotard, he argues, the issue is not so much the scope of the narrative as the claims they make and the ways that they make those claims. The issue, he argues, is legitimation rather than size. Metanarratives in Loytard’s usage are “a distinctly modern phenomenon” and are “stories... Read more
David Burrell writes, “Modernity was fairly constituted by a quite specific opposition to medieval thought, as we have noted, so could be called ‘post’ or even ‘antimedieval’ . . . this mode of thinking proceeded by avoiding, if not aggressively removing, any reference to creation and the creator/creature relation. It would follow from that characterization that some forms of ‘postmodern,’ in the sense of ‘antimodern,’ discourse would display affinities with medieval inquiry, since ‘postmodern’ could be translated as ‘anti-antimedieval.’” Burrell... Read more
Philo’s views on the mediation of the logos are summarized in the TDNT article on mediator: “Stretching from the middle of the world to the ends, and back from the extreme edges to the middle . . . [the logos] holds together all the parts of the world . . . . He it is who prevents the world from sinking back into chaos, who as an arbiter holds in check the mutually hostile elements, who reconciles them to one... Read more
The medieval arguments in favor of the notion of preparation for justification through created grace are founded on anthropological and cosmological claims. McGrath summarizes the Summa Fratris Alexandri , which he calls “the first systematic discussion of the nature of created grace,” as follows: “The Holy Spirit can be said to dwell in the souls of the justified as in a temple; this is impossible unless there is something within the soul which, although not itself the temple, is capable... Read more
Here is a hypothesis or suspicion, not a conclusion, much less a conviction: The notion that God rewards what we do with what we have, and the notion that we are purely passive in salvation are not, as they appear, extreme opposites, but are two positions within the same framework. From one end: The notion that we can do something of our own clearly implies that we have some powers of action that are not given, that are not already... Read more
Charles Hodge doesn’t quite get to justification as deliverdict here, but he comes close: “[Paul] had just said that the believer cannot continue to serve sin. He here [in 6:7] gives the reason: for he who has died (with Christ) is justified, and therefore free from sin, free from its dominion. This is the great evangelical truth which underlies the apostle’s whole doctrine of sanctification. The natural reason assumes that acceptance with a holy and just God must be founded... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In