Post tagged with theology

  • Worldviews: A Conversation with Barry

    October 10th, 201111:13 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    I have enjoyed having a convesation with Barry Bowen about the concept of worldview. Unfortunately extended comments in the threads at the Christian Post are very hard to follow since paragraph breaks are not allowed and thus everything gets mashed together. So I have reproduced my response to Barry here:  Barry: "if Christian convi...

  • What was in Jesus’ hand? Lessons on why you can’t take the Bible literally word for word

    October 04th, 201112:55 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    According to a 2007 Gallup survey "About one-third of the American adult population believes the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally word for word." Now let's think about this. Would you please open your Bibles to Revelation 1:14-16: *ahem* "His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like...

  • Should you marry your theology to the latest science?

    September 30th, 201112:49 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    I've been slowly reading through Michael Shermer's How We Believe in my spare time. It is a pleasant enough read, but has many noticeable weaknesses. Perhaps the biggest weakness is that Shermer is an advocate of the separation or two worlds model of theology and science (what Stephen Jay Gould called the "NOMA" or non-overlapping magisteria approa...

  • Can we rationally believe in an atonement we don’t understand?

    August 18th, 201103:02 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Having surveyed Ken Pulliam's discussion of the PST, I have now been asked by Robert: "How do the other theories fare? I'm guessing they have problems too, since men like Luther and Calvin rejected them in favor of PST." First off, Luther actually is associated with the Christus Victor model rather than PST, though Calvin most definitely is an adv...

  • Could Jesus have given the wrong theological answer?

    July 08th, 201111:53 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Many Christians are happy (or at least willing) to recognize that Jesus had ignorance of certain matters. For example, he couldn't have told you that London will host the 2012 Olympics or that Transformers 3 would clean up at the box office. But that willingness to embrace Jesus being ignorant suddenly seems to exaporate when it comes to theologica...

  • What is the Greatest Enemy of Faith?

    June 27th, 201112:56 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    The other day I came across the following passage in a Peter Kreeft book: "Dullness, not doubt, is the strongest enemy of faith, just as indifference, not hate, is the strongest enemy of love." (Everything you ever wanted to know about Heaven, 20) That gets my vote for thought provoking quote of the day, and it rings true to my own experience. As...

  • Does universalism have a chance in hell of being true?

    February 15th, 201111:36 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Thomas Talbott has pointed out that one can find evidence from scripture to support the following three incompatible claims: (1) God wants to save everyone (2) God can save everyone (3) Not everyone will be saved Since this is an inconsistent set, a person has to give up at least one of these propositions. And so Christians do. The Calvinist g...

  • Believe propositions p and q and thou shall be saved

    April 26th, 201009:50 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    It all started when Ken Pulliam asked "What do you think that a person must believe in order to be saved?" Then came the substance of my subtle and richly nuanced response:) "I cannot provide a simple answer on the terms I have been given because I don't think the foundation of a saving relationship with God is found in belief at all." This hardly...

  • Does doctrinal disagreement demonstrate God's incompetence?

    April 17th, 201010:47 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    We have been discussing the theology of atonement for the last couple weeks. In "Mysteries for Poets and Skeptics" I quoted AnAtheist.net who quipped in one of those threads (with a mischievous chortle, no doubt): "I wonder if He [God] gets a certain amount of pleasure (as much as I do) from watching all of these theologians wrestle and disagree w...

  • An Atheist Pot, a Christian Kettle, and an ironic charge of blackness

    December 12th, 200912:53 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    In my last couple posts I initiated a discussion on theories of incarnation. In the threaded discussion to the post "Did Baby Jesus know more physics than Einstein?" I made the following comment: "The challenge is to explain what this [incarnation] means qua human and divine knowledge in a way that is both orthodox and coherent." In other words, ...
Page 1 of 2 PREVIOUS 1 2 NEXT
Advertisement
About this blog
An exploration of faith, knowledge, reason and doubt (with the occasional trite pop culture reference thrown in for good measure).