Final Exams, or, See ya in a few weeks...

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Abortion, Authoritarian Self-Deception, Evangelicals, and Trump: a collected Twitter essay from Christopher Stroop

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I was kickin' it on Twitter last Wednesday night while doing some grading and then some editing, and I caught a Twitter essay from Christopher Stroop in my feed that leaped off the screen at me. It pulls together a number of issues that have been bouncing around in my head, many of which I fit in the title. Stroop's reflections merge political and psychological analysis, and helps us understand how there could have been "good Germans" and how we might end op with "good Americans." Let us hope that we do not, and work to make that hope a reality.

Anyway, I wanted to share this Twitter essay with you, gentle readers, because there are enough people who read DET or follow me and DET on social media who are within or close to evangelicalism and will be aided by this analysis. Stroop was gracious enough to allow me to collect his tweets and make them available. If you've made your way here on a mobile device, however, you would probably prefer to read this …
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So, You Want to Read Wolfhart Pannenberg? A guest post by Andrew Hollingsworth

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[Ed. Note: Andrew Hollingsworth, PhD, is an adjunct professor of theology at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He tweets: @andrewh_mc11. He writes at Theology and Stuff, and Trinityhaus.]

So you want to read Wolfhart Pannenberg? Great! Why, you ask? I’ll tell you. Wolfhart Pannenberg was one of the most important theologians in Germany (and the world!) in the 20th century. Several theologians, such as Philip Clayton, Ted Peters, and Fred Sanders have noted in their obituaries for him that the world lost a theological giant on September 4, 2014. His three-volume Systematic Theology, though not as many volumes as Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, is one of the most significant contributions to the field, having one of the vastest scopes and one of the most ambitious aims of any before it. Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology is perhaps the most interdisciplinary one written to date. He is well known for a statement he made in an interview once: “Because God is the creator of everything…
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Karl Barth on Hell, the Devil, Demons, and Universalism – A Florilegium

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You know, all the most interesting topics. Although Barth often confessed that he didn’t find these questions particularly interesting. At best they might draw sideways glances, as it were, as one travels the theological road.

But I found a number of places in the records of Barth’s later conversations that I thought folks might find interesting, so I’ve collected them here. And if you aren’t familiar with the term “florilegium,” here you go!

All these texts are from the first volume of Barth in Conversation, with pages numbers given in parentheses along the way. As usual, italics are in the text and bold is mine.

Hell
“Now we come to hell. You shouldn’t laugh! There is nothing to laugh at! What does hell mean? I think hell means to be in the place where you are once fore all damned and lost without ceasing to exist, without losing the image of God, being what you are but being damned and lost, separated from God, whose creature you are, separated also from your neighbor, from the coh…
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Brief Book Note: Peter Brown’s “Ransom of the Soul”

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I’ve wanted to read this book since it was first published in 2015. And I’ve had the paperback version on pre-order for a while. So I was thrilled when I got the notification that it had shipped, and knew that I would be able to put it at the top of my “books that I hope to read this summer” pile.


Peter Brown, The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity (Harvard, 2018).

Now, you might find it odd, gentle reader, that I would be so interested in a book on the afterlife since I recently commented in another post that “It may be that death is a site of encounter with God. Beyond that, there isn't much one can say.” It’s the intersection of wealth with afterlife that made me curious. Here’s how I would summarize the question answered in this book:

How did Christianity in the first half-millennium leverage its vision of the afterlife in order to discipline wealth?
Brown answers that question, as we’ve come to expect from him, in exciting detail, with se…
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The Significance of Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones: A Humorous Interlude

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Those who know me offline, or who have been long-time DET readers, know that I like to have a laugh from time to time. This is one of those times. Through the mysterious workings of the internet, it came to my attention that the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London (yes, Spurgeon's church!) has put online a piece written long ago by Martyn Lloyd-Jones. It is a magzine-style piece that is very critical of the thought and legacy of Karl Barth. It is entitled, "The Significance of Karl Barth."

Now, the things that Lloyd-Jones says about Barth are laughably and obviously misguided to anyone who knows Barth, so there is humor in that alone. The sorts of claims that he makes have been debunked again and again in the secondary literature (even if, unfortunately, there are plenty of people walking around who still hold them - even people who should know better). But an idea popped into my head whereby I might use humor to make even more obvious the absurdity of his take on Barth.

S…
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