Word: theologian
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...something that can be demonstrated logically or rigorously," says Neil Gillman, a professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. "[The idea of a God gene] goes against all my personal theological convictions." John Polkinghorne, a physicist who is also Canon Theologian at England's Liverpool Cathedral, agrees: "You can't cut [faith] down to the lowest common denominator of genetic survival. It shows the poverty of reductionist thinking...
...best examples of religion as social organizer, according to Binghamton University's Wilson, is early Calvinism. John Calvin rose to prominence in 1536 when, as a theologian and religious reformer, he was recruited to help bring order to the fractious city of Geneva. Calvin, perhaps one of the greatest theological minds ever produced by European Christianity, was a lawyer by trade. Wilson speculates that it was Calvin's pragmatic genius to understand that while civil laws alone might not be enough to bring the city's deadbeats and other malefactors into line, divine law might...
...Well, almost none. The prospect of a thumbs-up from Verheugen this week - his recommendation will be voted on by E.U. government leaders at a summit on Dec. 17 - has focused the minds and unstopped the pens of critics around Europe. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the Vatican's conservative theologian, warned that admitting Muslim Turkey to the E.U. would threaten the Continent's "cultural richness." French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin pointedly asked in the Wall Street Journal: "Do we want the river of Islam to enter the riverbed of secularism?" Austrian E.U. Commissioner for Agriculture Franz Fischler opined that Turkey...
...relief, they turned to a source as old as Anselm. The French theologian Peter Abelard had also worked in the Middle Ages to address Jesus' role in reducing sinful humanity's distance from God, but he did so without recourse to tit-for-tat transaction. His atonement took place less as a compact between God the Father and God the Son and more in the hearts of believers cleaving to the message of Jesus' life--and the love most dramatically expressed in his willingness to die rather than renounce his calling. "Love answers love's appeal," Abelard wrote. With Jesus...
Notes Yale theologian Serene Jones: "In substitution theory, the problem between humanity and God is one of debt. In Abelardian theory, the problem is one of ignorance. We don't have enough information." This fit in nicely with the Enlightenment spirit, and it took wing. The Hartford, Conn., minister Horace Bushnell, its great 19th century proponent, declared that atonement's new location was not in "remote fields of being" but in humanity, as "a moral effect, wrought in the mind of the race." Jesus' death became less central, because it was no longer the price for lifting the burden...