07 May 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
The following passage is so over-quoted that I hesitate to quote it again (I discuss the general idea in an essay in this book), but I'm going to do it anyway to make just one tiny little point. That point is this: though Aristotle is enjoying something of a renaissance among "conservative" Christian...
Read more → 06 Mar 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
For good reason, one might find John Calvin referred to as an "anti-speculative" theologian. But as with so many other monikers applied to Protestant theologians (e.g. "anti-scholastic"), one must take the label in its relative rather than its absolute signification. When confronted with biblicism, Calvin...
Read more → 05 Mar 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
Psychologist and University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson has become a recent internet sensation, with publications from the New York Times to The Federalist to the National Review and The Atlantic covering his rise and videos featuring him going viral on YouTube. It is a rise that has confounded...
Read more → 03 Jan 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
If one holds to some version of natural law or a natural knowledge of the virtuous and the vicious, it might seem to imply that nothing else is required for virtuous action. I mean, we all know what "the good" is, right? Well, yes and no. Affirming that everyone knows the distinction between right...
Read more → 19 Dec 2017
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
Charles Hodge's next reference to Schleiermacher in his notes as preserved in his son's Life comes from less than a week after the last reference, 14 March 1827 (a Wednesday, if you're curious). This journal-entry deals with the subject of pantheism, whether Schleiermacher was a pantheist, and the relation...
Read more → 09 Nov 2017
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
In the fictional story of the Fall into Modernity (coming soon as a Netflix Original Series), Sir Francis Bacon sometimes plays the role of a big baddie for banishing formal and final causality from natural philosophy (i.e. science; what he calls "physic"). Never mind the benefits this has for, you know,...
Read more → 25 Oct 2017
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
In the 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, Pius XII, relying on Pius IX, makes a rather startling claim about the duty of theologians in the church: It is also true that theologians must always return to the sources of divine revelation: for it belongs to them to point out how the doctrine of the living...
Read more → 20 Oct 2017
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson
In The Advancement of Learning 2.7.2, Sir Francis Bacon acknowledges that he's using old terms in new ways (e.g., "physic" and "metaphysic"). He claims that this is part of an effort to remain as close to tradition and antiquity as he can, even when he must depart from it in substance (at least in certain...
Read more → 13 Oct 2017
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
In a recent post at First Things, Archbishop Charles Chaput seems to want to appropriate Martin Luther's image of "Babylonian captivity" to describe the situation of "believing Catholics and Protestants alike" over against the bugbears of modernity: for instance, consumerism, sex, technology, and sex (this...
Read more → 05 Sep 2017
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson
Last week, I posted a couple of excerpts from Richard Muller's discussion of method among the Protestant orthodox or "scholastics" and their Reformational predecessors. Later in the same volume, he includes a useful summation of their basic philosophical stance. Though "Christian Aristotelianism" remains...
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