1/ Re-reading Taylor’s Sources of the Self and struck by this observation: across history, Western Christianity can be characterised as having two streams of arguments for God. (i) From Augustine, abductive arguments based on the inner life (“I can only make sense of my self in
2/ the light of something greater than my self, beyond my self.”) Under that umbrella, think of a cast as diverse as Anselm, Descartes, Kant, Feuerbach (kind of), Bavinck, CS Lewis…

And (ii) from Aquinas,

1/ One of the things I’ve been struck by through @JusBrierley’s new podcast is how hard it is now (at an intellectual level) to deny that atheism is most primordially an act of the will (i.e. the most basic condition for not believing in God is that the person doesn’t *want* 2/ God to exist). Admitting that most ultimately, you don’t believe in God because you don’t want to is honest and way more intellectually respectable than the claim that you’re an atheist for totally impartial reasons, but it also means your atheism has to be quite chastened and

1/🧵 Revisiting the economist Max Weber this week for my modern theology class.

Weber has some outstanding insights 👇 2/

https://x.com/DrJamesEglinton/status/1512897709304385546?s=20

1/ During WW2, J.H. Bavinck once wrote about a profound 20th century cultural shift towards voices that spoke, by default, in absolute and polemical terms. Here's his description of the polemical aspect:

"As a second trait in the 'new mindset', I point you to 2/ what I call negativism. By this, I mean that people prefer to think in polemical forms. People always oppose something, combat other movements. That negativism can sometimes go so far that on every matter, people automatically express themselves in purely polemical terms.

1/ First generation Dutch neo-Calvinists were interesting on images of Christ:

Kuyper (E Voto Dordraceno):
- It's ok to make images of finite things (material but inanimate: a drop of water; material and spiritual - humans; spiritual - angels) in ways that show their finitude.

https://twitter.com/JoshBranscomb/status/1691832517660233917

2/ For Kuyper, this is a general rationale for art. However, he argues that:

- It's wrong to make any visual representation of the divine essence, as it is infinite, and cannot be represented in any finite medium.

- Had cameras been around at the time of Christ, it would have

1/ 🧵 Four observations on how much perception of Kuyperianism has changed since Carl wrote this in 2013:

i) Kuyper as a naïve cultural optimist

The publication of Kuyper’s public theology volumes in English have changed the game on that front: his work was a titanic struggle,

https://twitter.com/ssimonnin/status/1654446726818811905

2/ he was acutely aware of the dechristianisation of Dutch culture, etc.

ii) The early 21st c. Dutch (artificial) public international image as a secular land of red light districts & drugs cafes (i.e. the anglo stereotype of the Netherlands that still prevailed in 2013)

1/ Typological hermeneutics: the prophet Daniel was a righteous man in unrighteous Babylon. His righteousness was such that although death stalked him, it couldn’t quite catch him. Even when left in a tomb of death - sealed with a stone (Dan. 6:17) - he emerged alive. 2/ The prophet Ezekiel twice said Daniel’s righteousness was enough to save his own life from temporal judgment, but wasn’t enough to save others from the same (Eze. 14:14, 20). It didn’t superabound redemptively for others. Daniel pointed to something that he himself was not.

1/ Of course, proper historical scholarship works ad fontes, doesn’t read the tradition backwards through the historical lens given by a more recent Bavinck/Barth type, etc. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing useful in the ways theologians like them write historical theology.

https://twitter.com/rscottclark/status/1639436833376591872

2/ In my view, such histories are revealing about the theologians in question, and in useful/thought-provoking ways: Barth’s historical sweep of theology from the Reformation onwards is the kind of history only Karl Barth would write, etc, but it’s also

1/ 🧵 Herman Bavinck on how to dress as a preacher (i.e. Bavinck’s affect theory of clothing for preachers):

Preaching is an embodied task. The clothes you wear will affect how you preach, and can make your preaching affected and untrue as an expression of your soul/personality.

https://twitter.com/ryangawrych/status/1638533423554785282

2/ Every preacher is different. To impose one form of clothing on every preacher’s body is anthropologically deficient.

“The diversity of individuals comes into its own in public speaking.”

1/ 🧵 One of the things I'm hoping Personality and Worldview might help is a recovery of the theological integration of preaching and the preacher's personality. In a UK context, at least, in recent decades a lot of Reformed/evangelical preaching has more or less tried to bypass 2/ the personality the preacher: the preacher is often envisioned as a public exegete who is there to tell you what the text says, and whose own personality should not "get in the way" of that.

Perhaps this is a reaction to preachers whose preaching primarily communicated their

1/ A short 🧵 on Johanna Adriana Bavinck-Schippers (1868-1942): 2/ The daughter of a wealthy shipowner, she was a highly cultured, multilingual woman - in particular, she was an anglophile who loved to travel in the UK with her husband, the neo-Calvinist theologian Herman Bavinck (1854-1921).

1/ No, the issue isn’t just people being squeamish or gutter minded. I think the article approaches the text with the wrong theological/exegetical method (bottom-up projection, not top-down analogical) which means it gets lost in the signpost & misses the mysterious thing

https://twitter.com/mporterperkins/status/1631301742959771649

2/ signified. That’s consequential. Add in Christology in pneumatology’s place (and the use of an extra-biblical analogy as part of that), the impression that selfhood is centred on reproductive organs, a tone that doesn’t reckon with many women’s experiences of sexual violence,

1/ What lit me up? Watching the horseshoe effect in action: a horseshoe has two extremes, and while there’s a good distance between them, they’re actually very close and similar. I care deeply about liberal democracy, and see it as under threat in Scotland. How so? The horseshoe

https://twitter.com/jedirev/status/1628804296216137728

2/ When we think of religion & politics, we only have three basic options for how to relate them. (i) Religion & politics overlap to the point that they’re the same thing. This is a theocracy, and it doesn’t work because it’s out-of-step with the free & inquisitive nature of

1/ A fascinating thing about the current national conversation around religion and politics in Scotland is that suddenly, a lot of people (Christians and non) are talking about worldview - a word I never heard here growing up. We now have two groups in society: 2/ (i) those who think their way of seeing the world is self-evidently the correct one, should enjoy state privilege, must be the viewpoint of the First Minister, is the basis for being able to trust others (i.e. you can't trust those who don't share your view), & can and should

1/🧵for Christians today suddenly panicking about UFOs and whether aliens are real. This is your reminder that the Dutch neo-Calvinists already got there a century ago. Take this Dutch book (1923), by the famous French astronomer Camille Flammarion, for example: 2/ This is the Dutch version of his French book La pluralité des mondes habités (The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds). The Dutch title is the question, 'Are the Heavens Inhabited?'

Now, Flammarion wasn't a neo-Calvinist, but the Dutch edition includes a discussion of prominent

1/ Hegel is so interesting - especially his analysis of the failing of Greco-Roman religion, with its gods as projections of human nature. The attractive feature of that religion was that its gods were relatable. 2/ But its weakness was twofold: (i) its gods weren't human enough. Greco-Roman religion was anthropopathic (i.e. it projected human traits onto gods who weren't human), whereas Christianity offered incarnation (i.e. God assumes a human nature). Christianity offered a relatable

🧵1/ A few people have been tweeting quotes from my chapter on Kuyper on Aquinas, where Kuyper has a lot of extremely complementary things to say about the Angelic Doctor (also in comparison with Calvin). One important thing to note: the point of the chapter is that Kuyper did 2/ indeed have some major praise for Aquinas. He thought Aquinas was the most significant thinker in the history of Christianity after Augustine, and greater than Calvin in that regard, because Kuyper thought two previous paradigm shifts had happened in the

1/ The way this blogpost has done the rounds on Twitter has been fascinating and a good reminder of how Twitter can be good/bad for theology. In this case, the blogpost raises a useful point (though one already covered extensively in published scholarship

delatinized.wordpress.com/2022/12/15/her… 2/ by Dirk van Keulen). But beyond that, it makes some textual claims that misread Bavinck - to the point that it’s a bit 😬 for the reader who compares the post to Bavinck’s own texts. Nonetheless, I’ve seen people sharing it uncritically, in a “wow, Bavinck

1/ Beyond all the usual stuff on the necessity of reading historical figures with an eye to the norms of their historical context (i.e. Bavinck used a mixture of primary and secondary/survey sources in a way acceptable to the scholarly standards of his day), and a reminder that

https://twitter.com/GJShearer/status/1603797041355935744

2/ @cam_clausing has a forthcoming @OUPReligion book on Bavinck's historical consciousness, the important thing about this blogpost is that we should check its claims about Bavinck ad fontes. I'll check them all later, but two of the most major claims, (i) that Bavinck called

1/ Part of the necessary complexity of Christian ethics is that the imitation of Christ often means Christians either don’t have to, or in some cases should be extremely cautious about, doing specific things Christ did. For example, Christ never married, and practiced celibacy.

https://twitter.com/wagraham/status/1579579821335941120

2/ It is *not* the case that in order to be like Christ, every Christian must reject marriage. Historic Christian teaching is that you can be like Christ in singleness or in marriage. In the same way, he had no possessions or home.

1/ 🧵 on how to do this if you’re learning Dutch.

https://twitter.com/SpeakinFluently/status/1578853096851062784

2/ You need to work hard at minimising your foreign accent & learn to sound more like a Dutch person in Dutch. Drop those hard Gs, go guttural. Roll your Rs. Learn the ‘ui’. Pay attention to the klemtoon of each word. It’ll make people much less likely to respond in English.