This week I want to continue pondering the implications of the resurrection, this time focusing on the bodily resurrection. The theological importance of bodily resurrection did not become fully obvious until Christianity moved beyond the Levant into Asia Minor and Greece, where the Semitic understanding of the world was far less significant and Greek and …
Cremation is not allowed in the Orthodox Church. There is one well-known exception (Japan, where evidently body burial is not allowed), and the fact that there’s an exception indicates that the reason for the proscription is deeper than cremation itself. There was an ancient belief among many in pre-Christian Greece and Persia that matter was …
Though we don’t often think of it as such, 1 John is a polemic against false teachers in the church. The dispute is not obvious to us because the group with which he is disputing, generally classified as “proto-gnostic” today (full blown Gnosticism would take another century to develop), was so thoroughly stamped out of …
I found a much clearer description of the dualism of Augustine in T. F. Torrance than anything I was able to say on my own. In the Augustinian outlook nature was looked at only to be looked through toward God and the eternal realities. As such it had no significance in itself but had significance …
Continue reading Dualism Postscript: Augustine and the Cosmos
One of the deeply rooted cultural tropes about our longing for God is the idea that we have a God-shaped hole within us that we constantly try to fill with pleasure, goods, fame, or happiness. These pursuits fall short because only God can fill the hole. This trope originates with Blaise Pascal, but it’s not …
One of the burning questions in the mainline Presbyterian church, of which I was a pastor for 20 years, was how we go about helping people. There are two general Protestant answers to the question. One, which tends to be associated with fundamentalism is that we need to convert them. The second, which tends to …
One of the most significant prophets of the new non-dualistic manner of thinking was Michael Polanyi. A chemist who began his illustrious career at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin shortly after WWI and emigrated to England just before WWII, Polanyi was in the thick of the new scientific approach pioneered by Einstein. Einstein’s theories …
Back in seminary in the mid-80s, a major focus of my theological education had to do with the rise of post-modernity. No one yet knew the implications of this huge shift in philosophical thought and cultural sensibilities, but there were signs, some frightening and some hopeful. Among the hopeful signs was the rejection of dualism …
Sometimes my best Orthodox insights come from Karl Barth and his student Tom Torrance. They have insights into Christian theology that contemporary Orthodox theologians miss. This is because they immersed themselves in classic Christian theology from the context of modernity. They both recognized something had gone rotten in the West. They turned to the fathers …
Just Another Jim 