Post Protestant intellectuals

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One of the best Christian rhetoricians.

Maybe second best.

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"I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

>Clive Staples Lewis
It just occurred to me that I never knew what C.S. stood for.

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Babbage, Leibniz, Newton, Kepler, Brahe, Faraday, Maxwell, Planck, Roentgen, Born, von Braun, Bacon, etc.

Leibniz believed in a spinoza like god not so much one of the traditional protestant sense

Protestant is defined as any Christian who isn't Orthodox or Catholic.

ok
i think you are right

Why won't this meme die

This is the worst

Anyone who places figures like Sproul or James White as intellectuals are only showing protestants as intellectually dishonest

What's the problem?

I am not a Protestant but Prot intellectuals include in my list
>WLC
>Jaroslav Pelikan
>Donald Fairbairn
>Philip Schaff
>Anthony Briggman
>TF Torrance
>Kierkegaard
>Paul M Blowers

These guys literally misrepresent the Church Fathers and history

The more intellectual Protestants tend to see Catholics as Christians and understand that the Church Fathers are a shared heritage transcending denominational lines

>The more intellectual Protestants tend to see Catholics as Christians
No, my friend, no Protestant has ever thought that.

Actually they technically don't because they have no official statement on the matter

But the more intellectual types tend to see them as Christians such as WLC, even if they disagree

And this is fine by all means as such views enable actual discussion and progress to be made

Pelikan converted to Orthodoxy before he died.

He did wrote many of his books when he was Lutheran

Either way I want a whole High Church ecumenical body where all the High Church will become the new force against the rising tide of degeneracy

Desu Vult

I had to read a book of his for Philosophy or Religion course I just took. He's pretty good and he's a great debater.

Van Til
Rushdoony
North

>he bothers listing meme philosophers like WLC while omitting Plantinga

wew lad

He's butthurt they BTFO him
See?

His podcast is fantastic.

>William "im not sure there's a God" Craig
No thank you

Came here to post him. Good taste user.

Why did the Christian apologetics thread got deleted?? Has reddit taken over?

Evangelicals had called men like Sproul out particularly on his misrepresentation of Augustine

DH Williams, an Evangelical himself called out James White and showed how he is in fact shows poor understanding of the Church Fathers

Too bad if you want liars and ignoramuses to represent the face of your denominations

Origen isn't Protestant

you took the bait

no

You took my bait

Now suck on it like the fish you are

I don't think there's any other option when it comes to representing Christianity.

succ

There's so many options and you have to pick the worst

Now kiss me

Brainwashed papist scum

Marilynne Robinson

Charles Hodge

J. Gresham Machen

R. L. Dabney

Alvin Plantinga

Petrus Ramus

Donald Knuth

Nicholas Wolterstorff

>Protestant ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''Intellectuals''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

You do know that protestant intellectuals are much more different than /pol/testant

He's just being a cheeky little memer, leave him be lad.

Jonathan Edwards

Karl Barth

John Calvin

Hugo Grotius

Herman Dooyeweerd

D. F. M. Strauss

Francis Turretin

Vern Poythress

John Williamson Nevin

>Mercersburg Theology

Do tell me more about this

Jacques Ellul

A true reformer

S-Senpai pls 0~0

He's a pretty poor intellectual compared to the others in this thread, he was certainly eloquent but not much else

There's not much at this point to tell. Scholars have only recently begun to dig into Mercersburg and the Mercersburg/Princeton, Nevin/Hodge debate in any great detail. Probably the best books available now are Littlejon's "The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity," D.G. Hart's biography of Nevin, and J.H. Nichols' "The Mercersburg Theology" and "Romanticism in American Theology: Nevin and Schaff at Mercersburg," these last two of which are very out-of-print. The former two represent some of the more current scholarship.

At any rate, the Mercersburg men were a bit more amenable to German idealism than the Old School Princetonians, and they had a bit of an infight that received very little general attention. Some Federal Vision/NPP types in modern Presbyterian circles have kind of latched onto the Mercersburg men in their efforts to draw modern Reformed theology into a more ecumenical direction with Anglicans, Catholics, and especially Eastern Orthodox. I think they read too much into the German Reformed theology, but agree with them on their revival of Nevin particularly with regard to a need to restore the high place that church life and especially the sacraments play in Reformed Christianity. Or I did agree, before I became an atheist.

fun fact: I know brad littlejohn. i live close to him.

Yeah, the confessional Reformed world in America is a pretty small one. That's still pretty cool though.

Thank you :3

I would try to hunt down some of the works you mentioned on the subject.

The only thing I knew about the movement is that it's the Reformed version of the High Church, or something along those lines.

You seem very steeped into these things. What turned you atheist?

>it's the Reformed version of the High Church
Eh, kind of. It's sort of akin to the high church movement that American Lutheranism had around the same time period. But it was pretty specific to the RCUS, the German-American Reformed church. Oddly enough, Hodge was also relatively well-versed in German thought, but tended more towards the realism and "rationalism" of the more Scottish and British old school.

>You seem very steeped into these things. What turned you atheist?
I actually was considering going to seminary to become a Presbyterian minister. I have a small theological library with some really kickass stuff, and as I like to browse used bookstores I'm always picking up whatever cool theology texts I happen across. As for what finally pushed me other the edge, I guess I just couldn't sustain my belief in the light of the way the world actually works. The Reformed faith, despite being much older and more connected with the Church Fathers and the Bible than most modern Protestantism, is still kind of fundamentalist. Regardless of the length of creation or the framework theology or the acknowledgement of metaphor, the Biblical account of Adam and the Fall doesn't make sense in a world in which evolution and death existed before the Fall.

Also, the more steeped you get into any movement, the more you realize that even the people who you admired the most are kind of shitty. At some point I had to admit that if Christ was preserving a Church for himself, it was pretty damn small and he was doing a shit job at it. I got burned pretty bad by every church I've been a part of. And, to be fair, I'm not much of a people person in the first place, so sometimes the expectations placed on you which others find so easy are pretty much dealbreakers. No matter how holy you are, if you're not a married Republican dudebro type who really hates teh gheyz, you're pretty much persona non grata.

Also, I'm on fucking Veeky Forums. Obviously there's something wrong with me.

>the Biblical account of Adam and the Fall doesn't make sense in a world in which evolution and death existed before the Fall
But muh metaphors... No seriously. How would you respond to a Christian that claimed Adam and Eve is just a metaphor and the bible only applies to things that pertain to salvation (like some Lutheran dude did this morning)?

Interesting, I guess I can somewhat relate.

Circumstances prevented me from actually going deeper into the whole realm of theology and religious studies which is something I do hope I can get a degree in sometime in the future.

Personally, I am more agnostic. On one hand there's uncertainties in the Christian understanding of the world. On the other, I feel so uncertain on whether a god could exist. He could or could not. No argument for or against his(or its) existence could've satisfy me.

I personally feel any steering of theology towards rationalism can be damaging(not to say that reason is bad but at some point, the subject of theology must acknowledge that it deals with something even reason itself cannot comprehend).

For now I guess I am on the fence. I personally lean towards the Orthodox but I do share affinities with Kierkegaard and respect Protestant scholarship on the area of Church history

One day I do hope I can truly go deeper. For now I scavenge whatever free book I can download, because I am a Jew :^)

Paul Ricoeur

At some point, if you are going to take the Bible seriously, you have to accept that it is a story of fall and redemption. I would readily admit that it is not a science textbook and that the Genesis narrative is not intended to lay out the mechanics of creation. However, if death entered the world through the Fall, the Bible falls apart. And if the Bible isn't the story of how mankind is saved from the Fall, sin, and death, then it is entirely meaningless. There's plenty of metaphor in the Bible, no doubt. But if you make the main arc of the Bible itself a metaphor, then it is a metaphor of nothing at all, and there is no reason to accept it as anything other than literature which has had a profound effect on human history, but nothing on which to base your own beliefs.

I won't try to dissuade you. If you can make it, great. I couldn't. Also, I do consider myself agnostic, but that's just a form of atheism. I'm perfectly willing to believe in a god, and I am perfectly open to the reality of the supernatural, but I have yet to find a compelling enough system of religion which does not contradict itself or what we have come to learn about the universe. Christianity was the best, and still couldn't cut it.

>if the Bible isn't the story of how mankind is saved from the Fall, sin, and death, then it is entirely meaningless
I see. This would answer the claim (the last straw) that the bible only pertains to matters of salvation. Because if just this point is also factually incorrect (that death entered the world through the Fall, and according to some theologians, also corruption and change), if this too is wrong then there's nothing to be saved from, no redemption, etc. I never thought about it this way. Dammit. And to think that I was just making an effort to come back to the faith... But this argument is too persuasive.

I guess I can somewhat see your point.

For me though, I have only just begun. I do not know where I'll end up. Only time and what I'll learn will.

I do hope one day I'll reach your level

>Regardless of the length of creation or the framework theology or the acknowledgement of metaphor, the Biblical account of Adam and the Fall doesn't make sense in a world in which evolution and death existed before the Fall.

You're absolutely right. There are Christians I respect who believe in evolution, but evolution and Christianity are incompatible if you think about it enough, which most people sadly don't. Unlike you though, I'm convinced the earth is young.

>At some point I had to admit that if Christ was preserving a Church for himself, it was pretty damn small and he was doing a shit job at it.

Well, if you're an atheist you don't have any way of saying definitively that it's wrong to only save some. And if Christianity is true, then Jesus is absolutely perfect and everything he does is just. If you disagree then the problem lies with you.

>I got burned pretty bad by every church I've been a part of.

Sorry to hear that. It happens way too much. America's major sects of Christianity are watered down prosperity gospel, and Steven Anderson style fundamentalism. A good church is hard to find, but please don't judge Christianity by the people who claim to follow it.

>Well, if you're an atheist you don't have any way of saying definitively that it's wrong to only save some.

You have completely misread me. But that's okay. I've heard it all before. Pigeonhole away. This is a board about the humanities, not an apologetics board. I'll talk about what I know when it's relevant.

Is he any good? How are his books on Christian origins, are they genuinely good or biased trash?

What is he then, Catholic?

His work on the NPP is worth reading I suppose

Technically yes(in the sense of pre-schism universal christianity)

Though most Protestants or the more intellectual ones at least will see him as one of the fathers all Christians will share.

This guy crashed into a Protestant "intellectual" wank circle and basically (albeit subtlely) destroyed Christianity and no one is even going to try to respond to him? Wew.

>Protestant intellectuals

More like N. T. Wrong

His NPP stuff is interesting and represents slightly more modern scholarship than a lot of older conservative Christianity. A lot of people dislike him but honestly, as an atheist with no particular dog in this fight, I find him much more compelling about the history of Christianity than I do the likes of Karen Armstrong or Reza Aslan or whoever the pop star Jesus writer catches the fancy of NPR and Oprah these days. His stuff on the historical Jesus and the resurrection are definitely orthodox and faith-based, but a hell of a lot more honest and less agenda-driven than those others.

I appreciate his chutzpah and his scholarly rigor. Even if he's wrong.

He's a heretic. A real heretic, not what the Catholics call heretics (Christians).

No, we do not.

Thomas Bayes

That friendship with the world is enmity with God.

Richard Bentley

>and still couldn't cut it.

What an arrogant person you are. Maybe if you dealt with your arrogance, you could admit that there exists a being manifold orders of intelligence greater than you.