The school of “Boston Personalism” which flourished in the first half of the twentieth century deserves a higher public awareness – their relative obscurity is significant for my thesis that Christianity’s best modern minds have been undeservedly “submerged” by historical forces which favored less worthy ideas. Gary Dorrien (Union Theol. Sem.) brings this sunken strand [...]
Archive for the ‘Constructive Orthodoxy’ Category
Albert C. Knudson – American theologian
Posted in Constructive Orthodoxy, personalism, philosophy, theology, tagged Albert Cornelius Knudson, American Methodists, American theology, Borden Parker Bowne, Boston Personalists, Boston University, Christianity, Gary Dorrien, Liberal Theology, Methodists, theism on June 19, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Submerged truth – 1. The Early Oriel School
Posted in Constructive Orthodoxy, tagged Christianity, Early Oriel School, English philosophy, English theology, nineteenth century, Noetics, philosophy, Richard Whately, theology on April 29, 2011 | 2 Comments »
I have been pleased enough with a 3-day review of writings by Richard Whately (1787-1863) to want him and his school on the front end of my project of cultural archaeology. My aim in this project is to appreciate some under-appreciated Christian thinkers whose work has become submerged or ‘lost’ beneath other and stronger (not [...]
Unsung Centennials – Amory Howe Bradford 1846-1911
Posted in Constructive Orthodoxy, tagged Amory Howe Bradford, Christianity, philosophy, providence, theodicy, theology on February 18, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
God can neither order nor permit anything the end of which is desolation and ruin… We are sick because we are human; we are disappointed because we make mistakes; we sorrow for those who die; but God does not send mistakes; men die because they are men, and death knocks impartially at the palace and [...]
Kierkegaard – Praying to an unchanging God
Posted in Constructive Orthodoxy, prayer, tagged Christianity, faith, Kierkegaard, philosophy, prayer, religion, sermons, theology on January 19, 2011 | 6 Comments »
“Prayer does not change God, but it changes the one who offers it” – Soren Kierkegaard (1847) We misunderstand Kierkegaard’s meaning here if we think he’s saying prayer doesn’t reach God. Neither is he calling prayer a one-way street, or a futile method of venting hope and desire, or a technique of problem-solving by self-hypnosis. We Christians know that [...]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Aids to Reflection (1825)
Posted in Constructive Orthodoxy, Conversion, tagged Christianity, philosophy, religion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, theology on January 12, 2011 | 6 Comments »
I meddle not with the dispute respecting conversion, whether, and in what sense, necessary in all Christians. It is sufficient for my purpose, that a very large number of men, even in Christian countries, need to be converted, and that not a few, I trust, have been. The tenet becomes fanatical and dangerous, [...]
The retrieval of that which is lost
Posted in Constructive Orthodoxy, tagged theology on August 4, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Last Sunday afternoon in a certain city, a dusty and over-stuffed automobile stopped in an empty public parking lot, where its driver made a cell phone call. He then drove to a shady corner of the lot and parked. Less than ten minutes later, a second vehicle entered the lot and came to a stop [...]
Schleiermacher – To religion’s cultured despisers (1799)
Posted in Constructive Orthodoxy, tagged atheism, Christianity, Church, modernity, philosophy, religion, Schleiermacher, Scripture, theism, theology on June 29, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
“Your very contempt for the poverty-stricken and powerless venerators of religion, in whom, from lack of nourishment, religion ever dies before it comes to birth, convinces me that you have a talent for religion… Become conscious, then, of the call of your deepest nature and follow it… banish the false shame of a century, which [...]
Lux Mundi (1889)
Posted in Constructive Orthodoxy, tagged Christianity, Incarnation, theology on June 17, 2010 | 9 Comments »
“… Many plausible attacks upon the Christian creed are due to the inadequate methods of its professed interpreters. Fragments of doctrine, torn from their context and deprived of their due proportions, are brandished in the eyes of men by well-meaning but ignorant apologists as containing the sum total of the Christian faith, with the lamentable [...]
