CADRE Comments

Allow me some reflections today, on a connection to Passover which isn't always appreciated. On the first Passover, the Hebrews (the dusty ones) were instructed to escape the destroyer sent by God (leaving aside whether the destroyer was or wasn't God Himself in action), by painting the blood of a slain lamb around their doors. On the last Passover (or the greatest Passover so far anyway, since we still celebrate it every year in remembrance as though we are participating in the event ourselves at that time), the One Who authoritatively sent the destroyer (or Who possibly even was acting as the destroyer Himself), voluntarily dies in a way the lambs had been symbolizing for centuries (as well as fulfilling other Jewish sacrificial prefigurations). The Lamb of God dies in solidarity with the lambs. But not only in solidarity with the lambs. The Only-Begotten of God dies in solidarity with the firstborn sons of man (and beasts) who were destroyed by the d...

Recently I was asked, due to my holding a minority position of which we will not speak (so to speak {lopsided g}), how "faith" and "works" fit with my position, the implication being that I have the wrong idea about faith and works and salvation somewhere. The specifics don't matter, since I am sometimes accused of having a "works" based salvation, and I am sometimes accused of having a "faith" based salvation, and I am sometimes accused of having an idea of salvation based on nothing at all. In fact, my idea of salvation follows from trinitarian theology, and from trying to reckon scriptural testimony coherently (exegetics); so it isn't surprising that I get accused of one thing or another, because (as I will argue below) trinitarian theology gives an important place to both faith and works, while of course ideas of faith and works in salvation which conflict with trinitarian theism ought to be avoided and denied. Anyway, I answered ...

I've been having an interesting discussion with Dr. Keith Parsons, an old friend, roommate and sparring partner of a friend of mine (Dr. Victor Reppert of Dangerous Idea ) over at the Secular Web channel of Patheos, specifically in the comments of Bradley Bowen's article "This Knee Won't Bow" . Because Disqus (the comment engine at Patheos) gets kind of screwy trying to keep track of the threads of a conversation, and doesn't always indicate when a comment has been properly posted (leading to inadvertent double-posts), I'm going to try to collect our side of the commentary discussion (there are several threads) here for further reference. (Although Blogger's comment system has an intrinsic wordcount limit now, so we probably won't be able to continue in our own comments below, even if Dr. P wants to.) This isn't my Easter "sermon" this year (I never really know if I'm going to do one of those beforehand), but a much more techn...

Warning!--a long and dense post is approaching. Several weeks ago, I posted up ( here on the Cadre Journal ) a revision of Richard Carrier's deductive anti-theistic argument from suffering, which he attempted during his debate with Tom Wanchick a few years ago (which for reference can be found here at the Secular Web. ) Now comes the commentary, where I take some time to explain the tactical and strategic applications of my revision. For an even longer commentary, where I discuss in more detail why I made the revisions I did, as well as discuss the level of similarity to Richard’s original argument, please see the doc file posted in the second comment of this thread at www.evangelicaluniversalist.com. The thread’s initial post is the revised argument found here on the Cadre as well. Note: all argument element references afterward in this article, such as P1 or C1, refer afterward to the elements of my revision of Richard's argument, not to the element labels given by Richard t...