Comments on: The Book that Almost Turned me Atheist

By: Bible, Tradition, Authority Part 2: The Power of God - Theology - Bible hermeneutics omnipotence - The Christian Humanist Blog

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 17:19:23 +0000

[...] of Ockham infects his own treatise. (I write about the Nominalism-turned-nihilism in my essay “The Book that Almost Turned me Atheist.”) I take as my own lesson that, when one uses language in one’s God-talk–and that [...]

By: Apophatic, Apophantic, and why I had to look them up | Hardly the Last Word

Apophatic, Apophantic, and why I had to look them up | Hardly the Last Word — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 15:38:18 +0000

[...] positively glowing when I discovered that anholmwiler (a screen name, no doubt) had responded to my post on Luther’s De Servo Arbitrio with a good blog post in its own right.? Today I’ll spend some time responding to some of [...]

By: ngilmour

ngilmour — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:25:34 +0000

Tracy Stephen Altman posted a long response to this post over on this page today. I haven't had a chance to read it (I'm on the road visiting family), but I do appreciate the engagement. I'll likely respond with a full-length post of my own once I have a bit more time, but for now I encourage readers to check his response out.

By: ngilmour

ngilmour — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:02:02 +0000

You’re right that I was rather imprecise in my word choice here, and I’m not sure that this reply is going to do any better. When Luther makes every Biblical imperative simply another instance of God’s paternal mockery of the elect on one hand and legal-case-building against the damned, he takes away something of the character of the narratives, especially those of the Old Testament. I’m inclined to say that Aristotle’s positing of freedom as a precondition for meaningful ethics, which Erasmus picks up, is also a valid tenet of literary reading, but Luther’s reading makes the entirety of the narrative into some kind of metafiction, a puppet show or some kind of thought-experiment rather than the rich story that a reading-sans-Luther discloses.

To answer your later post, I am inclined to say that texts disclose themselves even as readers bring their own Being to the act of reading. So yes, I’d say that Erasmus’s way of reading does leave more room than does Luther’s for the text to disclose itself to the reader. Luther’s way of reading, I think, forces many of his prooftexts to do work that, when most honest readers approach them, aren’t themselves inclined to do.

By: Benjamin Lee

Benjamin Lee — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:19:57 +0000

…but, I know what you’re getting at. I just didn’t want ol’ Luther to be hung out to dry.

By: Benjamin Lee

Benjamin Lee — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:15:24 +0000

For some reason I find it curious when you say, “Luther?s reading is an ideological one, one that flows from a very particular set of prior philosophical convictions rather than the disclosure of the character of the text itself.”

By: Some Dantean Thoughts from Internet Monk | Hardly the Last Word

Some Dantean Thoughts from Internet Monk | Hardly the Last Word — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 05:41:22 +0000

[...] hyper-suspicion, of course, is a species of the problem that I see in Luther’s De Servo Arbitrio, and despite my own early suspicions of the iMonk, his use early in the post of the phrase [...]