Saturday, September 12, 2020

Modern natural science as pneumatologically Unitarian

     "Modern empirical science is joined at the hip to the modern, if inchoate, claim to the universal accessibility to Spirit, just as it is joined to the breakdown of Christian claims regarding the Trinity and its difficult distinctions.  While More would have disapproved, many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientists, including Newton, moved in Arian and Unitarian directions.  Breaking down distinctions at their metaphysical roots simply made more sense of a world that required pacification and the alleviation of pain.  The Spirit dissolves differences, in favor of visible commonalities of behavior.  Such dissolution is just what a conflicted polity and a tortured body demand."

     Ephraim Radner, A profound ignorance:  modern pneumatology and its anti-modern redemption (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2019), 102.

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