Biblical Critical Theory

From Frankenstein to the Terminator franchise, the idea of human beings making sentient creatures in our own image has haunted our social imaginary. Similarly, as genetic and other technologies improve, the prospects of making a posthuman or transhuman with improved capacities is becoming an ever-more realistic proposition. How do these myths and d

The point I am making here is that the Trinity locates, at the very bedrock of relationality, deeper and more foundational than abuse and slander, not an "original violence" but the openness of irenic wonder, a "determinate word of peace, which loves" and which "corresponds to and participates in and is nourished by the inf

Human beings are in a bartering relationship with the gods: first I offer a sacrifice that the god desires, and then I can hope to receive the god's help as a consequence. We trade.

This is a god, Lewis continues, to which the naturalist can hardly object. By contrast, "What Naturalism cannot accept is the idea of a God who stands outside Nature and made it.

Christians, wherever practicable, to use biblical language to describe the world. The Bible's categories of creation, sin, grace, idolatry, and so on are not neutral and interchangeable with other sets of terms; they are particular figures that belong to and provide the rhythm for the Bible's account of reality

We are going to see this move of diagonalization again and again in these chapters. It is just what we would expect if the Bible presents an exceptionally rich, complex, and finely balanced account of reality, in relation to which the extrabiblical alternatives are partial, derivative, and lopsided.

We need to hold BOTH the absoluteness AND the pers

"The idea of the Fall is at bottom a proud idea, and through it man escapes from the sense of humiliation. If man fell away from God he must have been an exalted creature, endowed with great freedom and power." Only the exalted can be wretched; only the lofty can fall.

Behavior: Culture is expressed in and shaped by bodily habits or "liturgies," like going to the shopping mall, checking your phone when you have a spare moment, or sitting down (rather than standing or reclining) to eat. Some behavioral figures are individual; some are shared.

The physicalist challenge to belief in the soul also challenges the widespread belief that human beings are causal exceptions to nature, that we have a contracausal free will (or libertarian free will) that transcends natural laws.