The Little Friar

In a violent world, violence seems to be the most logical response.  So when guys like me insist violence actually isn't a logical response, we're often challenged with a typical rejoinder question:  "What would you do if, say, someone broke into your home with a gun to kill Kendra and your three fur babies?" The challenger often uses this question as a way of demonstrating that my (the pacifist's) conviction about violence is inconsistent, and that the existence of violence is necessary.  It's often posed in such a way that if the pacifist cannot give a satisfactory answer then violence is apparently vindicated, even in terms of warfare, despite the fact that the analogy between personal and collective violence is flawed.  I think the question suffers from a number of debilitating assumptions that are almost always unconscious to the challenger.  There's no such thing as a self-interpreting situation so let's get at the assumptions of the question ...

One of the arguments often leveled against my vision of salvation is that it denies the role of human freedom in choosing God. The argument goes like this:  God has created humanity as free beings and has thus bound himself not to interfere with their free decisions and choice.  Divine agency and human agency are conceived as mutually exclusive. In one form or another we find this proposition commonly advanced in discussions of synergism, providence, theodicy, and eternal damnation.  Please raise your hand if you have invoked the principle yourself. The underlying image is that of a stage.  God has created the stage and the human players, yet once having created them, God stands back, as it were, and lets the players live out their lives in freedom on the stage.   But there's a problem here.  The image is deistic.  It isn't Christian.  It forgets that not only has God created both the stage and players, but at every moment he is con...

Over a year ago (!) I wrote a brief mediation on some theological thoughts on time . I want to return to the trajectory of some of that, and explore some ideas about "time travel". Bringing up the question of "time travel" immediately will put some of my readers onto the path of Doctor Who and the TARDIS.  As tempting as it may be, that's not where I'm headed. While "time travel" is a phrase that may evoke the image of the TARDIS or Marty McFly and Doc Brown , those sorts of (to the uninitiated, at least) "outlandish" ideas of moving through space is accompanied by outlandish characters in outlandish modes of transport are most certainly not what I want to talk about. The cultural niche known as steampunk, where depictions of technology, culture and society is combined with Victorian-era inflections, is one case study that betrays something in a small though nonetheless considerable proportion of the populace.  It's the ...

I'm really good at making book recommendations.  So, after a friend asked what philosophy books I thought every person should read, I decided to take up the challenge. The problem of course, my introductory philosophy book notwithstanding, I think the line between what is "philosophy" and what is "theology" is fairly well blurred.  So if some of these choices seem rather arbitrary or without merit, just know that a theologian is making them.  Feel free to dismiss as you're inclined. First, I decided to leave off the list all the classics -- Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas and the scores of modern thinkers.  Not because they're rubbish, but because anyone making a request like this one, really should already have been reading them. These books are really in no particular order, so don't think that just because a book comes toward the end of my list, that it's less important.  In all honesty, I simply wrote as I was led to write.  That s...

There's always that inevitable moment in any Philosophy of Religion class when we come up against the various arguments for the existence of God.  And students are generally really excited, particularly Christian students.  That's because they think they're getting the necessary intellectual and critical armaments for assaulting the non-belief of non-believers. I always try to point out that, as far as these intellectual "arguments" go, they have more to do with the internally coherent logic of one's faith than they do with achieving intellectual superiority over non-belief.  In other words, while believing isn't non-rational, it is super-rational.  One can't get to belief by the way of reason alone -- especially for Christians. Take, for example, the so-called Ontological Argument for God's existence . When we're reading Anselm's account, I always point out to students that Anselm prays the ontological argument.  Direct address to...

Those of us who've grown up in the Church -- at least since the 18th century -- have been influenced by ways of thinking that we really don't even realize. Take, for example, the idea of miracle . At least since the 18th century, those of us who've ever given much thought to these things have to take a stand:  Either miracles happen or they don't.  And, as anyone who has taken Philosophy 101 knows, David Hume pretty much demolished the logical idea of a miracle back then.  According to Hume, there can never be sufficient logical evidence that miracles ever happened.  So, since you can't prove miracles ever occurred, Jesus obviously didn't do them.  And since Jesus never performed a miracle, he wasn't divine. And so many Christians find themselves unable to respond to Hume's critique precisely because they take the assumption -- namely, that miracles are an intervention into the natural world by a God who's somewhere remote -- as a fact. W...

I have four different book projects in various states of completion: Faith Thinking: An Introduction to Theology for Students  will be the first to be published, probably in January 2015.  Thinking: An Introduction to Philosophy for Students  will be available in early 2015. The goal is by February.   God Gets What God Wants: Biblical & Theological Essays on Trinitarian Universalism  will be available in mid-2015. My goal is June or July.  And finally, I'm aiming for  Good News: Principalities, Powers & Preaching  to be published in late 2015 (October or November).

I'm in the midst of editing and reviewing -- for what I hope is the last  time -- my book that introduces philosophy.  Since it's written as an ordinary introduction (for high school and college students), one of my themes in editing has been simple, short sentences.  I've  been trying to use a greater variety of sentence types in my writing, and I have particularly been laboring to achieve good short sentences.  It's harder than it sounds.  I've  also begun to notice that many students could improve their writing dramatically merely by setting their sights on shorter sentences.  Many students have somehow got the assumption that scholarly writing requires a certain tone of voice.  I don’t know where this assumption comes from.  I'm inclined to blame it on the rhetorical posturing of well-meaning but fundamentally inept high school English teachers -- the kind of teacher who promotes "critique" and "decoding" of "texts" instead of e...

I'm all the time lamenting that dogmatic theologians and biblical theologians rarely talk to one another, much less do their respective work informed by the other.  That's a tragedy, really.   Because any dogmatic theology is, at its heart, hermeneutical.  That is, it interprets the Gospel.  Which is another way of saying that theology means to give meaning and content to the word "God".   The Gospel is, quite simply, an explication of the word "God".  The Gospel narrates the story of Jesus as the story of God's act.  It narrates the history of Jesus as the history of God's own being.  To put it rather bluntly, we might say that the Gospel  defines  God -- it defines God as the event that happened in the history of Jesus .  A certain Jewish man named Jesus lived for others, was executed, and was raised to life:  This is the Christian definition of God. It's always been the responsibility of Christian faith to explain the word ...

Preaching, I wrote recently, is done "without apology".   Someone reading that couple of paragraphs rightly asked, "So what do you think about Christian apologetics?" For those of you unfamiliar with it, Christian apologetics  is the task of mounting a rationally convincing argument in defense of ( apologia  in Greek means "a defense offered at court") the Christian faith.  I think that's a misbegotten enterprise at best.  But, on my more snarky days, I think it's crap.  I have no room for a foundationalist, rhetorically-convincing logical argument that someone convinces our culture in a compelling way to rethink Christianity.  Which is an odd  position for a Christian theologian and pastor to take.  So, over the course of the next couple of days, let me lay out why I think thus.  Today, I want to talk about the hollowness of apologetics as a whole.  I believe the Christian message is concerned with  truth  -- and tha...

I've seen not a few Facebook posts over recent days about atheists -- how they're wrong, how to confront them in truth, how to defend against their "assaults".  And, each time, I'm tempted to ask:  Which God don't they believe in? Because, let's be honest:  To some folks I'm an atheist.  In much the same way that early Christians were called atheists by their Roman neighbors.  They refused to worship the deity of the emperor.  (How I wish the Religious Right still had that problem.)  Jurgen Moltmann once said, "It takes a faithful Christian to make a good atheist".  And he's right! A lot of my best friends are atheists, too. And for good reason.  This tends to be something lots of Christian apologists -- particularly conservatives -- miss.  All sorts of people refuse to believe in all sorts of gods for all sorts of reasons.  Theology, in many cases, comes down to biography  -- to the lives we live -- more so than to logic....

I typically eschew twitter debates.  How can one make the necessary moves in argument with a constraint like 140 characters?  How do you develop an account of subtle differend  (to use Lyotard's word) that is at once open and  committed? Today, though, I was inadvertently drug into one, which I promptly exited, over the contrasts between capitalism, socialism and distributism.  This guy wanted to tell me Jesus was a socialist.  I disagreed.  But I couldn't develop my argument fast enough with just 140 characters.  Jesus does have a "preferential option for the poor".  He speaks quite a bit about the kindness of the Gospel toward the disenfranchised.  He condemns personal greed.  But it's quite a jump from there to say he was a socialist.  (Pro proto-socialist, at best.  But even then I'm not sure.) If Acts is any indication, the Church took such Kingdom economics seriously.  Acts 5 comes immediately to mind.  So ...

Many of you are aware of Immanuel Kant's famous categorical imperative in ethical theory.  There are many ways to describe the categorical imperative.  One way to describe the categorical imperative is that virtue should always be an end in itself rather than a means to an end.  That is to say, virtue is virtue when it is pursued for its own sake and not being used for some Machiavellian or strategic purpose.  What this means is that virtue isn't always rewarded in the world.  And that's what makes virtue virtue. We might say that virtue isn't an economic transaction with the cosmos. Virtue isn't an exchange where if we do X the cosmos will give us Y.  Of course, we'd always like to have Y, the good outcome.  But if we are truly virtuous the good outcome isn't the root motivation.  We do the right thing regardless , because it's the right thing to do.  Virtue is an end in itself. What I'm wondering about is if there might be a ca...

Any number of my friends lately have been dealing existentially with the effects of what I call "the intellectual turn" in Christianity.  The intellectual turn  has to do with the intellectualizing of Christianity, and its correlative trouble dealing with doubt.  Intellectual  doubt is less about lament and the absence of God than it is about intellectual skepticism, having difficulty believing, epistemologically speaking, in the existence of God.  Such intellectual doubt has become particularly acute for them because that there's been a hollowing out of faith in many sectors of Christianity.   More specifically, for lots of folks, faith simply means belief .  Further, "belief" is taken to mean "I think proposition x is true".  Thus, having faith means something like "I believe God exists".  While atheists are defined as those who say "I don't believe that God exists".  Faith becomes reduced to asserting (or denying) propositi...

If you've taken Intro to Philosophy 101, you've heard of the ontological argument .  First, let me summarize: (1) God is the greatest being we can imagine. (2) To exist is greater than not to exist. (3) Therefore, God exists.  Forget, for the moment, that what this argument actually does is to  prove that God is the greatest being that we can imagine and that, if we imagined God, we have to imagine that God exists.  But imaging God's existence isn't proof that God does, in fact, exist.  To address this we'd have to add premises like "to exist in reality is greater than to exist in the mind".  Regardless, you get the basic idea. You may also remember the argument has lots of critics.  It's too simple.  It's too clean.  It's too cute.  Point in fact, I am  one of those folks who finds the argument unpersuasive.   Today, though, I want to focus on something else.  At its heart the ontological argument h...

Bernard Buffet, "Pieta", 1946 I've been constructing my theology of revolt -- a theological account of Christians at war.  And I've been doing that with an interaction with Greg Boyd's God at War .  But, as I recounted yesterday, there are some problems that demand addressing. First, I need a way to think about spiritual warfare that doesn't require a belief in literal angels and demons.  And please note that I used the word require .  If you're one of those with no problem with the vision of spiritual warfare presented by Boyd in God at War then no translational work is necessary.  But given that I -- and quite a few of my other Christian brothers and sisters (particularly those of a "liberal" bent (whatever that means) -- am, my hunch is that not everyone will accept Boyd's account as it stands.  Some of us need another way to envision spiritual warfare.  But as I've said, I think this "translation" is fairly strai...