Thanks for listening, Dale!

Thank you for listening to the show. I think the tension you’ve mapped out between total depravity and free will is one of the perennial puzzles of Christian theology, and I think that to some extent, many Emergent-types and many Calvinist-types wrestle with that.

I like the way you formulate the relationship between how God creates humanity and how Sin warps humanity, and I think that a strong focus on the goodness of creation–and the logical priority of that goodness over the distortion of the goodness–is something that I often miss in the most dour of Calvinist treatments of things. In fact, that’s one of the most promising things about the Radical Orthodoxy movement, a postmodern theological movement that folks often overlook when describing the landscape of theological discourse in 2010.

If I could point to a couple of Christian writers who have done well in addressing that tension, I’d point to Augustine and Aquinas (as I tend to do for most important questions of theology, I’ll admit). Although Aquinas’s strong insistence upon the goodness inherent in Creation because of Creations’s analogical relationship to God strikes many Calvinists I know as too optimistic, I do think it’s a good antidote to the ways that some post-Reformation theologians elevate the Will to the foremost revealed datum about God (after the manner of William of Ockham, I think, but that’s for another discussion) above the goodness and love of God. And although Augustine’s focus changes over his career, I think his mature work in City of God articulates a wonderful (in the archaic and the pop-music senses) vision of the relationship between the goodness of human harmony (and the times when that harmony breaks into the sinful world) and the horror of the logically-posterior corruption that now grips that world.

I love that Sam’s family has joined our loyal listeners. My own mother and father are faithful listeners to CHP as well, and I’m glad that for the most part, we’re producing programs that make our folks proud.

Maybe ask Sam if there is a way to post the podcast so it can be stopped at any point and resumed at that point.

I am now listening to the 11/17 podcast. I am a calvinist, but not a Neo-Calvinist. Maybe it would be more accurate to say I am a Kuyperian. On the other end, Brad Cecil (an initiator of the emergent church movement) and I were roommates our first year of college. We have not had a lot of contact over the past 33 years, but have had some contact over the past year or two (maybe because I live in the Twin Cities where Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones are (and where lead Neo-Calvinist John Piper is situated)).

On Neo-Calvinism, I remember seeing a Christianity Today article three or four years ago on them. The photos were of a new Calvinist conference. What almost scared me was that the audience was almost entirely 19-26 year old males, no females in the audience (as I recall). That alone would be enough to frighten me away from that new Calvinism.

On Donald Miller, I find his works (and I have read most of them) not quite emergent. He seems to me a biblical fundamentalist, almost like a 16th century anabaptist. I wonder if David James Duncan is more honestly religious (almost Christian) than Miller.
Eric

I don’t think that’s something we can control, although I’ll look into it. In the meantime, you can control that yourself through iTunes. Right click on the podcast, click “Get Info,” click on the Options tab, and check “Remember playback position.”