Posts

David Bentley Hart That All Shall Be Saved

  That All Shall Be Saved (Yale University Pr: New Haven, CT, 2019)— A Summary and Review David Bentley Hart's argument, when you strip away the polemics, is fairly simple: if Christianity is coherent at all, universalism is the only version of it that can be. Not a hopeful add-on, not a pious wish — the only logically stable position. Everything else in the book is Hart working out the implications of that claim across scripture, philosophy, and the history of doctrine. He starts with the moral problem, and it's the part of the book I keep coming back to. Borrowing William James's thought experiment — would you accept a utopia bought at the price of one soul's eternal torture — Hart says no coherent Christian ethics can take that deal, whether the soul in question is Hitler or an unbaptized infant. Historically, he points out, the church's answer has usually included the infant. He insists that anyone who claims to fully believe in eternal hell while also loving th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sarah Coakley::God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity

 I am including in this post a review of another book by Coakley. Review of The New Asceticism Sarah Coakley’s  The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God  Bloomsbury Continuum, 2015) is a compact but ambitious theological intervention into some of the most divisive questions in contemporary Christian life: sexuality, gender, priesthood, celibacy, prayer, and the meaning of desire. The book gathers essays around a single constructive proposal: the churches will not move beyond their exhausted polarities until they recover a serious theology of asceticism. Coakley is not calling for a return to repression, moralism, or ecclesiastical control. She refuses to enter the familiar debates over biblical texts, ecclesiastical policies, or competing ethical positions. Rather, she argues that Christian asceticism, rightly understood, is the lifelong training, purification, and intensification of desire in relation to God. The modern church has lost a coherent theol...
Post a Comment
Read more

David Tracy

  This essay is a synthetic, interpretive overview of David Tracy’s theology, aiming to:   ·        Explain Tracy’s hermeneutical method and its development over time.  ·        Defend the public character of theology in a pluralistic context ·        Show how Tracy negotiates tradition, modernity, and postmodernity without collapsing into either foundationalism or relativism The thesis is that Tracy offers a viable model of Christian theology for a radically pluralistic world by grounding theological reflection in interpretation, conversation, and the enduring power of religious “classics,” especially the Christ-event. I hope the reader will find the following to be true: ·        Comprehensive: Covers Tracy’s full intellectual range ·        Accurate synthesis: Faithful to Tracy’s categories and vocabulary ·   ...
Post a Comment
Read more