Queen of the Sciences

After losing our way and tangling ourselves up last time, in this second episode on theology and experience we once again get off to an inauspicious start with a serious attack of the giggles (and if you've never heard Dad giggle, well, you're in for a treat). Having gotten that out of our systems, we sketch out some of the reasons in Western intellectual history for the problematic place of reason and then explore some rubrics for interpreting "incorrigible experience" (Cornell West) fruitfully for life and faith alike. Also: do theologians actually believe what they teach?

Related episodes: American Revivalism, Pragmatism, The Empiricists Strike Back, Critical Social Theory, Faith to the Aid of Reason.

Notes:

1. DescarTTTTTes [sic], Meditations on First Philosophy

2. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding

3. Havel, "The Power of the Powerless"

4. Wolterstorff, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief

5. Gadamer, Truth and Method

6. Mother Theresa, Come Be My Light

7. Warnock, The Divided Mind of the Black Church

8. We mentioned my fiction several times: here's a book of parables, Pearly Gates, and my recent book of short stories, Protons and Fleurons, and keep an eye out for a novel later this year!

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Experience is everything, so talking about experience is impossible. Nevertheless in this episode Dad and I attempt to do so, with the result of tangling ourselves in knots and occasionally losing our composure. If you ever wondered why experience was the most contentious of sources, methods, and goals for theology, well, here it is, case in point.

Notes:

1. Methodist Quadrilateral

2. Driver, Patterns of Grace

3. Theologia Germanica

4. Kolb, Bound Choice, Election, and Wittenberg Theological Method

5. Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology

6. Charry, "Experience"

7. Zahl, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience

8. See also our previous episodes on Athanasius, the Blumhardts, Nenilava, and American Revivalism

Do you rejoice every other Tuesday to see a new Queen of the Sciences episode appear? Then consider supporting us on Patreon. You can start at just $2 a month; more gets you swag. Or just pay us a visit at sarahhinlickywilson.com and paulhinlicky.com!

Dad and I discuss Putin's invasion of Ukraine in two kingdoms perspective.

Notes:

1. Related episodes: Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague; The 8th Commandment in Cancel Culture; Two Kingdoms 16th-Century Edition; Two Kingdoms 20th and 21st-Century Edition; Samuel Stefan Osusky (Dad’s Slovakia book); I Am a Brave Bridge (Sarah’s Slovakia book); Athanasius Against the World

2. Check out Dad’s book Before Auschwitz: What Christian Theology Must Learn from the Rise of Nazism

3. The Wolfhart Pannenberg quote comes from his Systematic Theology, vol. 2

4. What we’re calling the Orthodox Barmen Declaration: “A Declaration on the Russian World Teaching”

5. Aleksandr Dugin

6. Reinhold Niebuhr, Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist

From the sublimity of the Blumhardts and Nenilava to the ridiculousness of American revivalism. Let's face it, a revival is never honored in its own country. In this episode, these two American theologians trace the irritating history of how Heinrich Bullinger of Zurich (where else?) corrupted Luther's doctrine of the new birth, setting off a chain reaction that bounced from stark Puritan double predestination to the hysterical self-determination of American revival religion, and pretty much everything else American, too. Like it or not, we're all revivalists now.

Notes:

1. Dad's article "The Doctrine of the New Birth from Bullinger to Edwards" explains all

2. Check out The Book of Concord and do a word search on "regeneration"... prepare to be amazed

3. Gritsch, Born Againism

4. Phil Cary, Good News for Anxious Christians

5. Sealed—if you haven't yet, go back and listen to our bonus episode on this amazing memoir from (as of last month) the Rev. Katie Langston!

And hey! If you've made it this far in the show notes, you're probably a super fan, and should consider declaring yourself as one on Patreon. You can start at just $2 a month (which is basically a buck an episode). Give more monthly and you get swag. Or just pay us a visit at sarahhinlickywilson.com and paulhinlicky.com!

And you thought the Blumhardts would push the limits of your Lutheranism! Have we ever got a prophetess for you. In this episode, we recount the wondrous life and ministry of Nenilava, a lay evangelist, exorcist, and eventually crowned prophetess of the Malagasy Lutheran Church. Along the way we discuss what it means for Western Christians to encounter, understand, absorb, and critique such models of mission from newer Christian churches, how to think about evil spirits, and what emergent offices of ministry in the mission field might offer to tired-out Christendom.

Notes:

1. In addition to the Blumhardt episode, check out Perpetua and Felicitas for some surprising overlap between them and Nenilava, and also the episode on Gudina Tumsa, the Ethiopian Bonhoeffer

2. Now in print! (and ebook too) Nenilava, Prophetess of Madagascar, edited by Sarah Hinlicky Wilson and James B. Vigen

3. For more about the Royová sisters of Slovakia whom Dad mentioned on the show, see here

And hey! If you've made it this far in the show notes, you're probably a super fan, and should consider declaring yourself as one on Patreon. You can start at just $2 a month (which is basically a buck an episode). Give more monthly and you get swag. Or just pay us a visit at sarahhinlickywilson.com and paulhinlicky.com!

After our overview of Luke and the conception/birth stories in Part 1, now in Part 2 we dig deeper into Luke's unique parables (Good Samaritan, Lost Sheep-Coin-Son(s), Rich Man and Lazarus, Dishonest Steward etc), teachings (inviting those who cannot pay you back, Pilate's bloodletting of Galileans and the tower of Siloam), and narrative episodes (boy Jesus in the temple, the many women, Zaccheus, Emmaus, distinctive Ascension story). We wrap up noting commonalities between Luke and John, and also Luke and Paul.

No special notes for this one, but see the notes for the last episode.

Do you rejoice every other Tuesday to see a new Queen of the Sciences episode appear? Then consider supporting us on Patreon. You can start at just $2 a month; more gets you swag. Or just pay us a visit at sarahhinlickywilson.com and paulhinlicky.com!

Following on our previous two-parters covering the Gospels of Mark (part one, part two) and John (part one, part two), in this episode we finally get around to covering the prequel to the Book of Acts (also covered in two parts), namely the Gospel of Luke. We discuss whether Luke was a Jew or a Gentile and what difference that would make, what he left out of Mark and why, what he took from Matthew or possibly Q, how not to read the bits about purity and Pharisees anti-Judaically, and the unique Lukan portrait of John's and Jesus' conception and birth, starring Elizabeth and Mary. Plus, I try to pin Dad down on the Virgin Birth.

Notes:

1. Levine and Witherington III, The Gospel of Luke

2. Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death

3. Kinzer, Jerusalem Crucified, Jerusalem Risen

4. Here's an article I wrote years ago reflecting on the infertility and adoption stories of the Bible

And hey! If you've made it this far in the show notes, you're probably a super fan, and should consider declaring yourself as one on Patreon. You can start at just $2 a month (which is basically a buck an episode). Give more monthly and you get swag. Or just pay us a visit at sarahhinlickywilson.com and paulhinlicky.com!

So apparently we're all still the Puritans that The Scarlet Letter taught us to revile: eager to shun, vilify, condemn, and label. Is this an American thing, a Christian thing, or a human thing? Is social condemnation the best bulwark against political condemnation or the gateway to it? How do we assess the difference between false witness and accurate witness to unhappy truths? Does "putting the best construction on everything" make suckers of us, easily manipulated and gaslit? And if we oppose cancellation, should we then cancel the cancellers?

Notes:

1. Luther gives his explanation of the 8th Commandment in the Small Catechism

2. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago and "Live Not by Lies"

3. Havel, "The Power of the Powerless"

4. Bonhoeffer, Ethics

5. See Dad on MLK in Beloved Community, pp. 348–54, and also this exposition of "the Hinlicky rule"

And hey! If you've made it this far in the show notes, you're probably a super fan, and should consider declaring yourself as one on Patreon. You can start at just $2 a month (which is basically a buck an episode). Give more monthly and you get swag. Or just pay us a visit at sarahhinlickywilson.com and paulhinlicky.com!

In which I tell you a bit about my new short story collection, Protons and Fleurons: Twenty-Two Elements of Fiction, and then read you one of them, "Cobalt: A Mystery," which features among other delights Henry Melchior Muhlenberg as the detective, and me doing a German accent.

Read more about mystagogical realism here.

Season 4 of Queen of the Sciences starts next week with an episode on The Eighth Commandment in Cancel Culture!

One last bonus episode for 2021! Katie Langston is a convert from Mormonism to Christianity. She tells her story in Sealed, published this year by Thornbush Press. An amazing story for all fans of amazing grace!

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