When John enters heaven, he sees several things “before the throne”: seven lamps that are the seven Spirits, a sea of glass like crystal, eventually a pile of discarded crowns (Revelation 4:5, 6, 10). Elders sit on thrones around the throne (4:4). He doesn’t see any altar. He also doesn’t see a Lamb, but then suddenly there’s a Lamb (5:6). And at the same time, the elders and creatures get some incense (5:8). At that point, though, the incense isn’t... Read more
“Atheism may have turned a corner,” writes Tom Roston at Quartz. He’s referring to Sam Harris’s latest, Waking Up, subtitled “A Guide to Spirituality without Religion.” It’s got Harris quoting Rumi, a Sufi mystic of the 13th century: “One day, you will find yourself outside this world which is like a mother’s womb. You will leave this earth to enter, while you are yet in the body, a vast expanse, and know that the words,’God’s earth is vast,’ name this region from... Read more
Seven angels have appeared. They are given trumpets, but before they start there is an “interlude” as an eighth angel offers incense and then throws coals from the altar to earth (Revelation 8:3-5). When he does, the phenomena of the throne (Revelation 4:5) are replicated on earth. At the end of the trumpet sequence, as the seventh trumpet blows, loud voices announce that the kingdoms of the earth have become the kingdoms of the Lord and His Christ (11:15). The... Read more
The editors of The Question of Peace in Modern Political Thought argue that peace has received more attention from philosophers than is often admitted, but they don’t think that it’s received nearly enough attention. Their collection aims to address that gap with essays on Luther, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Benjamin, Derrida, Habermas and others. The essays, of course, discuss many intriguing dimensions of peace: the triumph of fear over honor in Hobbes’s concept of peace, Rousseau’s suggestion of... Read more
When the angel blows the first trumpet, one-third of the land and one-third of the trees, along with all the grass, gets burned up by the fire coming from heaven (Revelation 8). It sets a trend. Throughout the trumpet section, things are destroyed by thirds. In part, this this is a mathematical increase on the judgment that was depicted with the fourth seal, where 1/4 of the earth was given to the green horse. God’s judgments increase in severity and completeness... Read more
Pannenberg’s notion of the ontological priority of the future may be difficult to grasp, but it falls into place when we realize that the scope of his ontology was “reality as a whole.” That may seem to add diffuseness to the vagueness of the original concept, but the two large concepts actually come together coherently. After all reality as a whole isn’t complete yet. As Christiaan Mostert emphasizes in his God and the Future, since we live in a temporal and... Read more
If God knows all that is going to happen, can I be free? Saying “No” creates considerable difficulties about our understanding of human nature. But if we insist on human freedom in such a way that excludes God’s foreknowledge, we face equally considerable difficulties, this time about God’s nature. Ryan Byerly has written a dense and difficult book proposing a novel way to revolve the dilemma, The Mechanics of Divine Foreknowledge and Providence. Byerly begins by arguing that foreknowledge is not... Read more
No one is justified by the works of law, Paul says, and supports the claim with what appears to be a paraphrase of Psalm 143:2. The Psalm says “for not righteous before your face are all the living.” Paul writes, “by the works of the law no flesh is justified” (Galatians 2:16). The Psalm has traditionally been taken to imply total inability: We know that no one living can be justified by law because no one can keep the whole... Read more
No one is justified by the works of law, Paul says, and supports the claim with what appears to be a paraphrase of Psalm 143:2. The Psalm says “for not righteous before your face are all the living.” Paul writes, “by the works of the law no flesh is justified” (Galatians 2:16). The Psalm has traditionally been taken to imply total inability: We know that no one living can be justified by law because no one can keep the whole... Read more
Born into a pious Scottish family living in Canada in 1848, George Romanes might have been destined for ministry in the Church of Scotland. Reading Darwin upended his plans, and his early adulthood was marked by public disputes about science and faith, Romanes taking up the case for Darwin and against natural theology. David Pleins explains in his recent In Praise of Darwin that Romanes believed Darwin had destroyed the natural theology of Paley and others, In a dispute with George... Read more
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