Why should there be a final judgment when God judges in time? Aquinas answers: “Judgment on something changeable cannot be rendered fully before its consummation. Thus judgment cannot be rendered fully regarding the quality of any action before its completion, both in itself and its results, because many actions appear to be advantageous, which by their effects are shown to be harmful.” Even a human life continues after the human life is ended: (more…) Read more
1) Verse 4 moves from the affliction of the apostles (“our”) to the comfort of “those who are in any affliction.” This movement does not depend on any similarity or identity between the affliction of the apostles and the affliction of other sufferers (though cf. v. 6b). Members of the church may be afflicted in ways that the apostles have never experienced, but the apostles are still able to provide comfort through their own experience of comfort in affliction. Here... Read more
A few notes on Descartes, Meditations 1-2, with lots of help from Jean-Luc Marion. Descartes’s ego cogito, ergo sum is not, Marion points out, original, at least in its form. It has origins in Augustine, who offered this response to the skeptics: “I have no fear of the arguments of the Academics. They say, ‘Suppose you are mistaken?’ I reply, ‘If I am mistaken, I exist [si fallor, sum].’ A non-existent being cannot be mistaken; therefore I must exist, if... Read more
Some scattered thoughts inspired by comments from Chris Schlect and Doug Wilson at a faculty discussion of de Lubac today: How is it that theologians (like Norman Shepherd, Steve Wilkins, Rich Lusk, and others) who want to expunge the notion of merit from theology get accused of being “neo-nomians” and legalists, teaching that we can be saved by our own works? How can they be so badly misread? What is happening in Reformed theology that so polarizes and confuses things?... Read more
Milbank asks the intriguing question of whether de Lubac’s surnaturel thesis “rather deconstructs the terms of the Schleiermacher/Barth divide.” He appears to mean that the polarization of Schleiermacher’s “intrinicism” and Barth’s “extrinicisim” is dissolved by de Lubac’s Thomist understand of nature and grace. To adopt, for the moment, an idiom I shy away from: The supernatural is there in the natural (as Schleiermacher would insist), but the natural is only what it is by extending beyond itself to the supernatural,... Read more
Milbank contrasts de Lubac’s advocacy of patristic and medieval hermeneutics, which insists that the allegorical fulfills and completes the literal, with the Yale school, which he sees as living in “the no-man’s land of ‘history-like narrative’ which at once abolishes real history and ignores the essential allegorical underpinning of Christian doctrine.” Read more
Further along his his treatment of de Lubac, Milbank discusses the change in the meaning of causality and divine causality in the medieval period. Drawing on the work of Jacob Schmutz, he gives this account: Prior to 1250, influentia was understood in its etymological sense as a “flowing-in” from God to creatures. As Milbank says, from this viewpoint, “the ‘general’ divine activity is indissociable from God’s ‘special’ activity, his overall from his particular providence.” Bringing in the category of gift,... Read more
INTRODUCTION The French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) was one of the most significant Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, a central figure in the ressourcement movement and the nouvelle theologie movement that inspired the change of atmosphere in the Catholic church leading up to Vatican II. In his recent book on de Lubac, John Milbank claims that de Lubac and the Russian Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov were the two great giants of twentieth-century theology. (more…) Read more
Much of the following was inspired by a lecture by Dr. David Powlison of the counseling center at Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia. INTRODUCTION As disciples of Jesus, we are all called to take our cross to suffer with Him. He suffered because He provoked murderous hatred from his enemies. Our afflictions are less grand: The car battery dies the same day you’re having a job interview and you have to get the kids to the dentist before school and you shut... Read more
At the end of his intriguing discussion of Gericault’s painting Scene of Shipwreck, Julian Barnes gives a brief summary of the fortunes of Noah in Western art, which he says change significantly after the Sistine Chapel: “In the Sistine Chapel the Ark (now looking more like a floating bandstand than a ship) for the first time loses its compositional pre-eminence; here it is pushed right to the back of the scene. What fills the foreground are the anguished figures of... Read more
Leithart
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