Friday, December 16, 2005

Theology in the Blogosphere

The 100th Christian Carnival is up at NickQueen.com. I found especially interesting the post on the view of messianic prophecy in the Talmud.

Nestorius Lives is very good post on the Theotokos doctrine at "The Crusty Curmudgeon." (HT: Rebecca Stark at Theologica)

Was Jesus really a carpenter? Euangelion discusses the alternatives to the traditional attribution.

Loren Rosson III discusses New Testament meanings of Christ's death at The Busybody.

Claude Mariottini discusses the proper translation of Isaiah 40:6.

At Prosblogion there's a discussion of Rowe's Can God Be Free? argument. It's an interesting argument; but I'm inclined to think it was already shown to be impossible by Malebranche. People forget that Leibniz, in his affirmation that God must create the best possible world, was explicitly opposing himself to Malebranche, who denies--rightly, I think--that there's any coherent argument for such a conclusion. The best you can do is conclude that whatever God does must be done in the best possible way given the ends He has in view. Malebranche himself held that this world was not only obviously not the best possible world, it's not even a particularly good one by most of our standards; but this does not reflect on God as infinite perfect being at all, since all that follows from God's being infinite perfect being is that his actions must be the best possible actions of their kind, not that his effects must be the best possible effects. Leibniz, in fact, makes no good argument whatsoever for his rejection of this view; and none of his erstwhile modern followers are even as good as Leibniz is at making Malebranche's distinction even to reject it, which is the absolute minimum for saying anything useful on the subject. I've given an argument for accepting what is essentially Malebranche's distinction in a similar context. Once the distinction is accepted, the argument fails.