Hamann opposed the abstractionism of the Enlightenment partly by emphasizing the centrality of sexuality in language, experience, and thought. He called himself a “spermatologist” in the sense that he was sowing seeds and in the sense that the thought of the relation of revelation and reason in sexual terms: “our reason should be impregnated by the seed of the divine word . . . and live as man and wife under one roof.” We must resist the devil to tries... Read more
Feuerbach wrote that the Trinity “is the secret of the necessity of the ‘thou’ for an ‘I’; it is the truth that no being – be it man, God, mind or ego – is for itself alone a true, perfect, and absolute being, that truth and perfection are only the connection and unity of beings equal in their essence. The highest and last principle of philosophy is, therefore, the unity of men with men.” Read more
Nicholas Carr asks in the July/August issue of the Atlantic whether Google is making us stupid. He points out that the web tends to scatter attention and diffuse concentration by bringing information from various sources at us all at once. As the web comes to dominate our access to news and entertainment, other media adjust to become more web-like. “Never,” he writes, “has a communications system played so many roles in our lives – or exerted such broad influence over... Read more
Garrett Green ( Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination ) thinks that Feuerbach serves up raw what the masters of suspicion – Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud – cooked and covered with sauces. The fundamental objection to religion in Feuerbach, and in his successors, is the notion that “religion is the produce of imagination; therefore religious claims are untrue.” With postmodernism, though, we lose the “foundational confidence that we have access to a ‘reality’ against which imagination might be judged ‘illusory.’ Imagination now... Read more
In his introduction, Ganssle provides a lucid description of McTaggert’s A and B series (or theories) of time: “The B-theory holds that the most important thing about locating events in time is their relation to other events. So something happens before, after or at the same time as something else. The A-theory does not deny that events stand in these relations, but it holds that the more important thing about events is that some are in the past, some are... Read more
I’ve just begun to look at Gregory Ganssle’s God and Time , but the index worries. In a book about time, there are no entries for “calendar” or “clock.” More worrying, there are only four dispersed references to the Trinity. Read more
Richard Swinburne describes God’s omnipresence in these terms: “God is supposed to be able to move any part of the universe directly; he does not need to use one part of the universe to make another part move. He can make any part move as a basic action . . . . The claim that God controls al things directly and knows about all things without the information coming to him through some causal chain, e.g., without light rays from... Read more
Matthew 15:27: She said, Yes, Lord; but even the dogs feed on the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table. We don’t belong at this table. I’m not referring here to the fact that we are all sinners who aren’t worthy to be considered our Lord’s table companions. That’s true, but I have something more specific in mind. We don’t belong here because we are not “children.” This is Israel ‘s table, and we are not Israelites. (more…) Read more
Matthew 15:22: A Canaanite woman came out from that region, and began to cry out, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is cruelly demon-possessed. What is baptism? What is it for? Why do we baptize infants? There are many answers to that, and throughout the history of the church, many of the answers have unnecessarily complicated the issue. In some traditions, the issue has been complicated by a complicated theology of grace. In other... Read more
In Matthew 15:29-31, Jesus moves back from the region of Tyre and Sidon to the sea of Galilee. He goes on a mountain and sits down. He has been on mountains a number of times already to do various things. Most recently, he ascended to a mountain to pray as the Twelve went across the sea in their boat and had to be rescued from a storm. But here Jesus goes to a mountain and sits, and the only other... Read more
Leithart
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