Theologia et Vita

  The parable of the wheat and tares (Matt 13:24–30, 36–43) appears only in Matthew and sits just a few verses after the parable of the four soils in the same discourse on the shore of Galilee, which I posted about recently. The two parables are frequently read together, and there is good reason for that; both deal with the response to the word of the kingdom, but they address different questions. The soils parable asks about the receptivity of individuals. This one asks about the visible community that the kingdom creates in the world and what God is doing with its mixed character. The Greek word rendered tares or weeds is zizania , which refers almost certainly to Lolium temulentum , darnel, a weed so closely related to wheat in its early stages that Palestinian farmers called it "false wheat." The two plants are genuinely indistinguishable until the grain head begins to form, at which point the darnel is visible by its smaller, darker seed. This agricultural specificity is...

The Gnostics who occupied Irenaeus's attention in the late second century had a characteristic move when pressed on Scripture: they would concede the text, then dissolve it. The writings were ambiguous, they said, or corrupted, or useful only to those already initiated into the oral tradition their teachers preserved. Irenaeus had watched this happen enough times to name it plainly in Against Heresies 3.2.1, written around 180 A.D. — these men, when "confuted from the Scriptures, turn round and accuse these same Scriptures, as if they were not correct, nor of authority." The move was familiar then. It is familiar now, though the vocabulary has changed. What made Irenaeus's response to this significant was not its forcefulness but its structure. He did not answer the Gnostics primarily by appealing to episcopal authority or to liturgical tradition, though he valued both. He answered them by going back to the text. His argument in 2.30.6 is almost blunt about it: ...

The year the Orthodox Creed appeared in print, 1679, England was still bruised from the Clarendon Code and the Five Mile Act, both of which had made life for Dissenters legally precarious for nearly two decades. Baptists in particular found themselves in a very precarious situation, caught between a restored monarchy hostile to nonconformity and a culture of religious suspicion that made any confession of faith simultaneously a theological document and a political act. Thomas Monck wrote the Orthodox Creed for the English General Baptists residing in Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, and Oxfordshire, congregations that held an Arminian soteriology and had been organizing regionally since at least the Standard Confession of 1660. The creed was drafted following a Baptist regional assembly held in Buckinghamshire in 1678, and intended to function as an official statement for the General Assembly of General Baptists in England. The confession is organized around fifty articles...

Leonardo's Last Supper is set at high noon, daylight flooding through the windows, the disciples all seated on one side of a banquet table laden with fish and leavened bread. Mark and Luke are clear: this was a Passover, eaten at night, with participants reclining. There is no lamb, no unleavened bread, and the choreography is entirely wrong. But the painting has so colonized the collective imagination that most people, asked to picture the Last Supper, see Leonardo's staging and nothing else. This is the pattern across a majority of the most celebrated works in Western Christian art: the evangelists get revised, quietly and brilliantly, into something the painter's own century could absorb. Giotto's Nativity (1305, Scrovegni Chapel) gives us a rustic stable, an ox and ass, Mary reclining in exhaustion. Matthew mentions magi; Luke mentions a manger and shepherds. The stable is nowhere. The animals come from Isaiah 1:3 by way of medieval imagination. Giotto's visua...

The doctrine of divine simplicity is one of those positions that sounds counterintuitive the first time you encounter it, and then, once it clicks, you start wondering how anyone could seriously think otherwise. The claim, stated in its classical form, is that God has no parts. No division between His existence and His essence, no real distinction between His attributes, no gap between what He is and that He is. His wisdom is not a property He happens to possess; it just is God, considered under a certain mode of description. Same with His love, His power, His holiness. You are not adding things together when you speak of God. The Augustinian instinct behind this was solid: if God were composed of parts, those parts would in some sense be prior to God, and then you've got an explanatory regress and, worse, a god who owes his existence to something other than himself. Aquinas systematized the intuition in the Summa Theologiae Ia, q. 3 with his trademark precision, but the roots go ...

  The Ordering Intelligence: What Heidegger Would Say About the Machine That Thinks Sparked by my weekly phone call with my father The temptation, whenever a genuinely new technology arrives, is to reach for the nearest available category and stuff the thing inside it. Artificial intelligence gets called a tool, a mirror, a threat, an assistant, a calculator with pretensions. None of these quite fit, and the misfit is not accidental. It points to something Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) diagnosed about technology in general: that the essence of a technological development is never captured by describing its mechanism. What matters is what it does to the world that receives it, to the minds that come to depend on it, to the kind of perceiving and valuing that it trains into human beings over time. That is where the interesting and uncomfortable questions live. Heidegger's 1954 essay "Die Frage nach der Technik" (which my father first translated into English, before William L...