Queen of the Sciences

The distinguishing quality of Christians is that they believe in Christ... a point that seems almost too obvious to make. But in fact, having belief as the central and distinguishing feature of a religion is so rare and weird that religious scholars have pushed back against the study of other religions through the lens of faith—to the point of not even wanting to study Christianity through that lens. What gives? In this episode, we walk through the findings of a new study on how exactly faith functioned in the Greco-Roman setting of early Christinaity and why it is rightly the defining feature of Christianity, with implications for the life of the church today.

Notes:

1. The key book we discuss here is Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith

2. Very relevant to the discussion at hand is Dad's Divine Complexity

3. Other episodes related to this one: Justification by Faith, Augustine's City of God

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The story of a prophet wherein the cows get the last word! Dad and I enthuse over this simultaneously hilarious and deep little book, ranging from hyperomnipresence to mutable immutability to the self-defeating prophecy and the spiritual dangers of resenting God's mercy.

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Notes:

1. Luther's commentary on Jonah in LW 19

2. Steiger, Jonas Propheta

3. Sonderegger, Systematic Theology vol. 1

4. For a good example of putting your money where your prophetic mouth is, see the Simon-Ehrlich wager

5. Check out our previous episode on Athanasius dealing with God's dilemma

6. Here are my sermons on Jonah 1, Jonah 2, Jonah 3, and Jonah 4, plus scroll down this page to #6 to see my cartoony take on the Jonah story

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The pastoral ministry doesn't have the social clout it used to, but it's hardly alone. "Vocations of judgment," as we term them in this episode, are under siege everywhere, as the understandable suspicion of human fallibility leads more and more to an outsourcing of human judgment to regulations, bureaucracy, and AI. We hope you'll agree that this is hardly an improvement. In this episode, we try to get a handle on the problem across the vocations, then zero in on what exactly does (and does not) constitute pastoral authority, hoping in the process to encourage and embolden besieged pastors with the true strength of their calling.

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Notes:

1. Related episodes are: What Is (Not) the Job of a Pastor?; How to Be a Congregation; Hannah Arendt

2. My new book, which also discusses pastoral authority, is To Baptize or Not to Baptize: A Practical Guide for Clergy, new from Thornbush Press!

3. Kant, Critique of Judgement

4. Critical fiction of the bureaucratic and machine era: just about anything by Kafka, the film "Brazil," and the Matrix trilogy.

5. Dad's essay "Complicity and the Christological Path of Ecclesial Resistance: Summons to a New Catechesis for a Time of Despair" appears in Truth-Telling and Other Ecclesial Practices of Resistance, ed. Christine Helmer

6. Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless"

7. A particularly good read on pastoral ministry is Eugene Peterson's The Pastor

8. And if you by chance are on Twitter, see if you can make #judiciousness go viral!

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Dad and I talk over my new book, To Baptize or Not to Baptize: A Practical Guide for Clergy.

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And here I was wondering if anything could beat justification for being a great idea hidden behind a lousy word. Well, pragmatism, you win. Dad renders this unpromising term lively and insightful, shows how its approach avoids the extremes of both rationalism and empiricism, and can prove to be a helpful handmaiden to theology (but, of course, not a foundation. Heavens no). Also, how to cope with the hell of the irrevocable.

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Notes:

1. West, Prophecy Deliverance!

2. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

3. Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

4. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

5. Thiemann, Revelation and Theology

6. Peirce, How to Make Our Ideas Clear

7. Royce, The Problem of Christianity

8. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests

9. Hinlicky, Luther and the Beloved Community and Beloved Community

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You can't get too much of a good thing! Picking up where we left off in the last episode, we discuss why "rectification" may be preferable to "justification," what human faith has to do with the faith(fulness) of Jesus, forgiveness vs. the defeat of the dominating power of sin, what on earth Paul is talking about with the "powers," and whether he is in fact suggesting an undoing of all the distinctions that make up the creation according to Genesis 1.

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Notes:

1. Check out these other related episodes: Justification by Faith, Romans, The First Two-Thirds of Acts, and The Last Third of Acts.

2. Dad's Luther vs. Pope Leo brings John Wesley to the rescue (whom we discuss also in this episode).

3. Luther's "How Christians Should Regard Moses" talks about the use of OT law in Gentile and Christian settings—and is not nearly as hostile as you might expect.

4. We both got the number of Jewish mitzvot wrong. It's 613.

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In this episode we only begin to tackle the myriad of issues in this searing, white-hot, impassioned blast from our favorite apostle early in his career. Who were these Galatians, and more importantly, who weren't they? Who were the interloping Teachers, and why does it turn out that sola gratia isn't specific enough? If the law is so treacherous in Paul's reading, why can he turn around and talk about "the law of Christ"? This and many more enigmas, plus ways of interpreting Galatians for good and for ill from Paul's own epistle to the Romans to more recent commentators.

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Notes:

1. Martyn, Galatians

2. Luther, Lectures on Galatians 1–4 and Lectures on Galatians 5–6

3. See in particular our previous episodes on John Part 1 and John Part 2, Romans, and Law and Gospel Part 1 and Part 2.

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What to do when there is no longer common faith or common facts? Reversing the tide of history is not an option, but the church recentering itself on its task of being conformed to Christ and learning to speak in the new language of the Spirit is. In this episode, we review what we've covered in the past two, why they run aground, and how Christian speech in the public square can aid civil discourse without illegitimately demanding assent to Christian faith.

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Notes:

1. More from Dad on this topic: "Luther's Anti-Docetism in the Disputatio de divinitate et humanitate Christi (1540)," in Creator est creatura; "Metaphorical Truth and the Language of Christian Theology," in Indicative of Grace–Imperative of Freedom; and Beloved Community, pp. 72–84.

2. Relevant to this topic from me: "Martin Luther, Pacifist?"

3. Pannenberg discusses the "disputability" of the Christian claim in vol. 1 of his Systematic Theology

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In matters civic, we have great sympathies with empiricist and classical-liberal critics of the recent woke madness induced by Critical Social Theory. And yet...

In this episode we distinguish among the many children of the Enlightenment, point out the strengths of the empiricist/liberal tradition but also its corresponding weaknesses that CST exploits, and exhort secular empiricists to reconsider the moral, spiritual, and theological roots of the intellectual tradition that they rightly see as critically endangered. So have a listen, and then share this episode with an empiricist near you!

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Notes:

1. Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories

2. Spinoza, Principles of Cartesian Philosophy

3. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

4. Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization

5. Locke, Second Treatise of Government

6. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

7. Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes

8. Also check out our episode on Faith to the Aid of Reason

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Hot diggity dog! Here we go, investigating the obscure Marxist theory beloved of academics that has gone viral in the past year... in both senses of the word. In this episode you'll get an effective innoculation, for the good health of your own mind as well as the polis at large.

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Notes:

1. Hedges, "Cancel Culture: Where Liberalism Goes to Die"

2. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx on Religion

3. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment

4. Tillich, The Socialist Decision

5. Simpson, Critical Social Theory

6. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization

7. Derrida, The Gift of Death

8. Brown, Undoing the Demos

9. Foucault, The History of Sexuality

10. Orwell, 1984

11. Carter, Race

12. Mitchell, American Awakening

13. Other episodes you might like related to this one: The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, What Is a Person?, Two Kingdoms: Sixteenth Century Edition, and Two Kingdoms: Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Edition.

14. For my further reflections on Marxism and its impact, see these blog posts on The Bitter Price of Making the World a Better Place and Three Memoirs of Slovak Communism, as well as my book I Am a Brave Bridge (the January and February chapters in particular).

15. Dad on these topics: “Luther and Heidegger,” Lutheran Quarterly (Spring 2008); “The Spirit of Christ amid the Spirits of the Post-Modern World” Lutheran Quarterly (Winter 2000); “Sin, Death, and Derrida,” Lutheran Forum (Summer 2010).

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