Liminal Christianity

 The pursuit of truth is good, but what is it? For a Christian, one criterion for an adequate notion of truth would be that it sheds light on what Jesus meant by calling himself "the truth." A correspondence theory of truth, so far as I can see, fails this criterion. If you disagree, take it as a challenge: how is Jesus the ultimate correspondence with reality? On the other hand, on a pragmatist notion of truth, Jesus being the truth is much like his being the way: he is the one who makes possible adequate navigation through life, especially as regards its ultimate problems. On a pragmatist account, what we call truth is provisional: it is a manner of articulating reality which has enabled us to make our way through life the best. For a Christian, Christ is the truth because he is the center of how we navigate reality. This is quite similar to Lewis's comment about knowing the Son is risen as he knows the Sun is risen: by seeing all things through the light that brings. T

 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