Valuable lessons In a recent article on the website Word on Fire, Henry T. Edmondson III argues that Pope Benedict’s encyclical Deus Caritas Est offers us “valuable lessons” about the nature of Catholic social teaching. That’s a fairly innocuous claim. It’s also a relevant one because, as Edmondson points out, the new Pope has taken the name “Leo” largely on honor of Pope Leo XIII who inaugurated modern Catholic social teaching with his encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. So what does Edmondson think Pope Benedict... Read more

Christians often lament that the Holy Spirit is the “neglected member of the Trinity.” The great Pentecostal New Testament scholar Gordon Fee put this argument in historical form a talk I heard him give at Duke some years ago. Fee argued that Catholics think of the Spirit as working through the Sacraments, while Protestants think of the Spirit as working through the Word. In practice, this means that the Spirit “disappears.” Catholics assume that the Spirit is at work wherever... Read more

I’ve written a number of posts in the past addressing the evangelical theological movement known as “open theism.” Last year I wrote a general evaluation of open theism from a Catholic perspective. Some years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts on the theology of Greg Boyd, one of the major open theists. I’ve been intending for a while to write about Tom Oord, whose work I find particularly interesting and challenging. He’s a bit different from other open... Read more

This past summer I began a series of posts reviewing David Bentley Hart’s book Tradition and Apocalypse. In the first post I discussed the general theological and historical issues Hart is addressing. In particular, I gave my own account of the development of early Christian tradition, particularly the doctrine of the Trinity, which is Hart’s major “test case.” In the second post, I discussed how the Reformation (my own area of expertise) fits into the picture, and the different ways in which... Read more

A Good Witch Is hard to Find In college, I was assigned Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is hard to Find.” I was disdainful of modern literature at that time and initially reacted badly to this dark tale of banality and murder. I saw it as typical modern secular nihilism. (Yes, I was very obnoxious.) But one of my professors happened to be a Flannery O’Connor scholar, and with his help I came to see that O’Connor was after... Read more

In the past two posts, I’ve outlined the historical background to the arguments made by David Bentley Hart in his book Tradition and Apocalypse. Hart’s starting point is the evidence of diversity and disruption found in Christian tradition from the beginning. It’s simply not true that there’s an unbroken, unchanging stream of tradition linking modern Christians to the time of Jesus and the Apostles. Rather, Christian tradition is full of conflict and innovation. Ideas central to orthodoxy, such as the Trinity, were... Read more

I just finished reading John Updike’s novel Gertrude and Claudius. I had never read an Updike novel before. I knew he was famous for novels about the torrid sexual lives of 20th-century middle-class Americans. So here’s a novel about the torrid sexual lives of upper-class medieval Danish people. It also happens to be a prequel to Hamlet. I found the beginning of the novel a bit off-putting–the style seemed stilted and awkward and the analysis of everyone’s motivations and thoughts... Read more

In Part 1 of this review, I discussed the background for David Bentley Hart’s arguments in Tradition and Apocalypse, focusing on the issues he raises concerning the diversity of early Christianity and the discontinuity of fourth-century Trinitarian orthodoxy with much that had gone before. In this post, I’m going to continue the story by looking at the work of John Henry Newman. I’d intended to discuss Hart’s critique of Newman but my interest in the broader issues surrounding Newman caused this post... Read more

What is tradition? David Bentley Hart has a habit of saying things that I have already begun to think. But he says them  much better and with much more profundity and coherence. Sometimes, to be sure, he puts ideas in my head that weren’t there before. More often, though, he confirms my intuitions and helps me work out their implications in a more systematic way. That’s definitely the case for the book of his I’ve read most recently, Tradition and Apocalypse. I’ve... Read more