Tag: Modern

I have been an oft critic of the ‘classical theistic’ god. The classical theistic God is typically known by actus purus, ‘pure being.’ I have argued that this conception of Godness as Monad comes to us from the ancient Greek philosophers, and not from God’s Self-revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ. Some would say that my argument is modern, but that would simply be the chronological snobbery fallacy. Truth has no provenance; that is, truth is truth no matter where or whence it comes. Bruce McCormack describes this sort of critique this way (here his comments are in the context of his treatment on Eberhard Jüngel’s explication…

Some people confuse the Enlightenment for the New Creation. To the point that the human spirit has come to a crossroads in its development, and become civilized, or good. But this is not what the Gospel says. The Gospel says that we are constantly being given over to the death of Jesus that His life might be made manifest through the mortal members of our bodies. This presupposes that as Martin Luther rightly emphasized, as Christians, we are simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinner) while we continue to inhabit this in-between time within our bodies of death. The…

When engaging the theologians, it is an important exercise to broaden out the frame, every now and then, in order to get a greater, even critical understanding of just who we might be engaging with. This holds true for any of the theologians, including Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance (the two modern theologians who, of course, have had the greatest purchase in my life over the last, almost, two decades). In an effort to expand the scope on the way we might respectively approach Barth and Torrance, I wanted to offer some words from ecclesial intellectual historian, the late, Steven…