Liminal Christianity

 There is a--sometimes helpful--caution against defining ourselves by what we are against, rather than what we are for. This dichotomy, however, if left unchallenged, can undermine our ability to develop our positive views. The dichotomy often works through a spatial metaphor of where our attention is directed. Are we focused on our opponent's views or our own? What is wrong or what is right? I want to challenge this dichotomy. In doing so, I will be able to explain part of what is right in the caution noted above. Suppose you direct your attention only at developing your own positive view, completely apart from criticizing others' views. No one is proposing we do this, of course, but it is a helpful limit case. If you were to do this, it seems, the only resources you could draw from would be those you already possessed. If you encountered a view you initially disagreed with, you would lack any way to engage with it. You could not, per hypothesis, criticize it, nor could you--s

Among those who believe that the end state of unbelievers is Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT), there is a widely popular sentiment that goes like this: "of course, we wouldn't have put hell into our theology if we were free to just make things up, but we're constrained by the text." This sentiment strikes me as a red flag. It would be one thing if this sentiment were expressed primarily by people who hadn't thought about it much, but I see this from academics in their accounts of hell. But if God is the source of all joy, and God has revealed his character by revealing the nature of hell to us, then the nature of hell ought to be a source of joy. Once we understand hell--whatever our account winds up being--that understanding should be a source of joy and we should end up in a place where we can glorify God for it. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on hell is, as often, helpful for getting our bearings here. That article divides up views based on whi

What is the role of moral risk in moral epistemology? Pascal's Wager suggests that we might profitably think about the expected value of our belief about God as follows: If God exists and I believe he exists, I get infinite gains If God exists and I don't believe he exists, I incur infinite costs. (NB: one only actually needs one of these infinities to make the argument go though) If God does not exist and I believe he exists, I get minor costs (in this life only). If God does not exist and I do not believe he exists, I get minor gains (in this life only). You can quibble with the exact values, but the point is that, given any finitely small probability that God exists, you should gamble that he exists. Pascal actually thinks you get minor gains if you falsely believe God exists and minor costs if you are right that he doesn't exist, but that seems to go against Paul's "most of all to be pitied" line. Pascal is not a strong voluntarist about belief, so technic

 As is their wont, conservatives are throwing philosophers' names around as criticisms without checking what they actually thought. For instance,  Dr. Kristin Du Mez recently got accused of being Foucauldian . This got at least me wondering what an actual Foucauldian might say about gender and sexuality in the Bible and White Evangelical society. First of all, though: I don't really have any credentials to bring to this. I've read Discipline and Punish, and I've picked some stuff up through osmosis, mostly skimming stuff by Dr. Cressida Heyes  and reading the SEP entry for Foucault . So: grain of salt required, but let's see where this goes, shall we? The first thing a Foucauldian might note is that our ways of being gendered and practicing our sexuality are structured by discourses which establish what counts as "normal" gender/sexuality. So, in each culture there are these discourses. One might go one of two ways here: on the one hand, one might see the

There are few song lyrics that bug me as much as the below: Turn your eyes upon Jesus, Look full in His wonderful face, And the things of earth will grow strangely dim, In the light of His glory and grace. The issue begins with the idea that "the things of earth will grow strangely dim." If all it means is that we lose interest in "things of the flesh," to use Pauline language, then all is well. If, however, "things of earth" is understood to include things like, say the Russian invasion of Ukraine, systemic racism, or troubles in one's relationships, then we must object. The glory of Jesus and his grace are revealed in history by his bearing our burdens and suffering with us. At the end of history, he returns to set all things--all of history--right. So if we see Jesus's glory and grace as they have been revealed, then in them we see revealed how far short of the eternal Sabbath rest we are. See Christ and what he died to gain us should cause us t

Deconstruction is complicated because it is a transition from a comfortable acceptance of one way of seeing things to another. One knows not where the journey will take one, only that one must make the journey. Thus, some mourning is involved: we who deconstruct have lost something that was a huge part of our lives: often not merely a theology and a hermeneutic lens but also a community. In a sense, we lose our Bibles: we lose our ability to confidently interpret the Bible. Reading deconstructively allows us to see some of how the faith cultures which raised us prepared us to deconstruct. This will look different for different people because some of us learned more or less and different things from those cultures. Some may have learned almost nothing good but "God is love," and even that may have been learned in a twisted fashion. I learned several things from people I no longer trust. In fact, in many cases, I don't trust those people because of  what I learned from them