I’ve been listening to Prokofiev’s third Piano Concerto almost non-stop since my friend Joshua Appel pointed me to the video of Yuja Wang’s stunning performance on YouTube. How did I live a half-century without this music? What’s so fascinating about this piece? For me, two things: One, this is what life is like. Two, I want to preach like this. Read more
Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent. “Rejoice in the Lord always,” Paul says (Philippians 4:4). “Always,” Paul? Always? Rejoice when my mother dies, and when my husband’s playing around, and when we don’t know where the next paycheck is coming from, and when I won’t make the deadline on the project I’m working on? Rejoice when I stub my toe in the dark, and when I fail a test, and when my roommate’s gossiping about me and turning other... Read more
A few more pieces of my response to my Presbytery regarding baptism. A. The intentions and assumptions of my work on baptism. First and foremost, I have wanted to understand the biblical teaching concerning baptism. Under the inspiration of the Spirit, the biblical writers wrote of baptism’s effects and benefits with an ease that does not come naturally to Reformed and evangelical theologians. Would any Reformed theologian say what Peter says in 1 Peter 3? I started out with the... Read more
The SJC committee also addressed my views on baptism, but again does not quote from my response to Presbytery. To clarify my views, and again to clarify what the Pacific NW Presbytery had in front of it when they considered my views, I post my response to the criticisms of the Majority Resport. Response to criticisms of Majority Report. Though concluding that my views are within Confessional boundaries, the Majority Report levels some serious and weighty criticisms against my views... Read more
This past week, a committee of the PCA’s Standing Judicial Commission (SJC) issued a report in a case from the Pacific NW Presbytery regarding my views on a number of theological questions. Among other things, the committee claimed that I denied the “bi-covenantal” structure of Scripture laid out in the covenant of works/covenant of grace distinction in the Confession. They quoted me as saying that the distinction of the Adamic covenant and the covenant of grace is more “administrative” than... Read more
Alvyn Pettersen ( Athanasius ) offers this intricate summary of Athanasius’ views on the question of whether God rescues humanity for His own glory or for the good of His creatures: “God created for humanity’s benefit.” That is to say, God didn’t need creation. Moreover, “the service of ‘those who do not exist’ [i.e., idols] is to humanity’s detriment. God himself is not altered. Certainly, the dignity due to God is indeed compromised by people’s ceasing to worship him; it... Read more
Published in 1992, The Knight’s Move: The Relational Logic of the Spirit in Theology and Science by James Loder and W. Jim Neidhardt is not widely discussed or read, so far as I have seen. It deserves better. It suggests a new grammar and logic for the dialogue science and theology under the connected categories of “relationality” and “spirit.” Drawing from Kierkegaard, mediated through Niels Bohr, the authors highlight the principle of ”complementarity,” or the coherence of contradictories,which for them... Read more
In a 2002 Theological Studies article, Elizabeth Groppe defends the late Catherine LaCugna against the common charge that her replacement of “economic and ontological” with ” oikonomia and theologia ” blurs the Creator-creature distinction and compromises God’s freedom. On the first, Groppe writes, “LaCugna’s relational ontology maintains this fundamental ontological distinction between God and creature. At the same time, this distinction takes different expression than the same distinction as articulated within a metaphysics of substance, given that the very form... Read more
For John Zizioulas and others, the Cappadocians introduced an innovative ontology, an ontology of communion. In his Letter 38, Basil provides some support for this interpretation, since he acknowledges that the Trinity represents a “new” and “paradoxical” sort of reality: “He who eternally exists in the Father can never be cut off from the Father, nor can He who works all things by the Spirit ever be disjoined from His own Spirit. Likewise moreover he who receives the Father virtually receives at the... Read more
Rahner’s complaint against the separation of the treatise de deo uno from the treatise de deo trino is a protest against all sorts of theological dualisms: Between nature and grace, between philosophy and theology, between natural and revealed theology, between foundational universalisms and derived or second-story particularisms. I make no claim about causation. But these all seem to reveal a common framework. Read more
Leithart
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