podcast 309 – Channing’s “Unitarian Christianity” – Part 2
The anti-Calvinist side of early American unitarian Congregationalist Christianity.
The anti-Calvinist side of early American unitarian Congregationalist Christianity.
How could God allow mainstream Christian doctrine to go astray?
0.75x 1x 1.25x 1.5x 2x 0:0000:18:54 podcast 45 – Sir Anthony Buzzard on Christian mistakes Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsPlayer EmbedShare Leave a ReviewListen in a New WindowDownloadSoundCloudStitcherSubscribe on AndroidSubscribe via RSSSpotify In this less biographical episode, Sir Anthony and I discuss various Christian mistakes: obsession with Hebrew names for God and for Jesus, keeping kosher food laws and Jewish holidays, the doctrine of tithing, and even the… Read More »podcast 45 – Sir Anthony Buzzard on Christian mistakes
In this second conversation, Mr. Kermit Zarley and I discuss a number of themes from his book The Restitution of Jesus Christ, including
the evangelical tradition of saying that “Jesus is God” or “Jesus is divine,” the biblical phrases “Son of God” and “the Son of God,” the texts commonly read as teaching that Jesus existed before his conception in Mary.
Sacrifice to the gods, or die. What would you do?
Saith the late Christian sage Dallas Willard: The Kingdom Among Us is simply God himself and the spiritual realm of beings over which his will perfectly presides – “as it is in the heavens.” That kingdom is to be sharply contrasted with the kingdom of man: the realm of human life, that tiny part of visible reality where the human will for a time has… Read More »Jesus: Not a Cheerleader
In this episode we hear the rest (chapters 4-7) of On the Nicene Council (aka Defence of the Nicene Definition, De Decretis) by Athanasius of Alexandria.
My paper “On Counting Gods” has just been published in the new TheoLogica journal.
Has “Science” shown that all causes are natural? Philosopher of science Dr. Jeffrey Koperski doesn’t think so.
An ordinary believer with ordinary reading comprehension can see that “Sharp’s Rule” recommends misinterpretations.
I am making slow (but sure) progress on The Same God? Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures. My background is in the philosophy of language, and particularly the theory of reference and singular terms. The research for this book has taken me to some strange places I never expected to visit (and never really knew about before). One of those is hermeneutics,… Read More »Exegetical neutrality
Mike, reloaded – before the smoke has even cleared.
More from Mike Almeida about a premise in an anti-social-trinitarian-argument argument I’ve been exploring. Also, (sorry Mike – actually, sorry everyone) I continue my cheesy cowboy theme. (But as a native Texan, it’s my sacred right, Pardn’r. 🙂 )
Here’s a summary in (attempted) ordinary English of his thoughtful post on infinitely increasing properties @ his PhilRel Blog, followed by my response, which I posted to his comments section.
What I call positive mysterianism about the Trinity is the view that the doctrine, as best we can formulate it, is apparently contradictory. Now many Christian philosophers resort to this in the end, but only after one or more elaborate attempts to spell the doctrine out in a coherent way. On the other hand, some jump more quickly for the claim, not really expanding on or interpreting the standard creedal formulas much at all. These are primarily who I have in mind when I use the label “positive mysterian”.
I ran across a striking version of this recently, in a blog post by theologian C. Michael Patton, who blogs at Parchment and Pen: a theology blog. In his interesting post, he says that all the typical analogies for the Trinity (shamrock, egg, water-ice-vapor, etc.) are useful only for showing what the Trinity doctrine is not.
This contrasts interestingly with what I call negative mysterians. Typically, and this holds for many of the Fathers, as well as for people like Brower and Rea nowadays, they hold that all these analogies are useful, at least when you pile together enough of them, for showing what the doctrine is. Individually, they are highly misleading, and only barely appropriate, but they seem to think that multiplying analogies like these results in our achieving a minimal grasp of what is being claimed. Maybe they think the seeming inconsistency of the analogies sort of cancels out the misleading implications of each one considered alone.
In any case, in Patten’s view, the best you can do is to Read More »Mysterians at work in Dallas
Apparently, modalism like Geisler’s is fairly common in the world of evangelical apologetics. Here’s an example I stumbled upon today, this post by Steve Cowan. The doctrine of the Trinity is not the view that there are three gods. Neither is it the absurd view that there are three gods and one God at one time. Early church leaders explained that the Son and the… Read More »more “personalities” modalism
Is the question absurd? Or does it make sense in light of New Testament teachings?
According to Dr. Michael S. Heiser, we see “two Yahweh figures” in the Old Testament: Yahweh and the “angel of the Lord”. He holds that the Jewish idea of “two powers in heaven” arose from reading these texts, which sort of set the stage for the more radical idea of God becoming incarnate, becoming a man, which he sees in the New Testament.
Richard of St. Victor is well known for his argument that perfect love must be shared between three persons, and since God’s love is perfect, there must be three persons in God. Richard presents this argument in Book 3 of his De Trinitate, and that’s what we’ll be looking at in this series of posts.
You say you’ve looked into the biblical credentials of “the doctrine of the Trinity.” But have you actually read anything by unitarian Christians?