Recent content by MWinther

Paul is speaking here about moral conduct. As the Reformers made clear, this does not bring us any closer to God. That view is works‑righteousness, and the Reformers explicitly rejected it. Of course we are to follow the moral law written on the heart, but we must also submit to the guidance of...

It seems the only response you people can muster is a John Cleese-style "No it isn't!" from the "Argument Clinic." Humanity's original relationship with God will be restored only after the eschatological resurrection. There is no cumulative progress before that moment, because evil is parasitic...

The world is no longer a field of divine forces, angelic agencies, or sacred causal chains; it becomes the arena of creaturely action governed by natural law. Disenchantment is therefore not a loss but the metaphysical prerequisite for creation itself. Only when the world is emptied of divine...

You are reasoning far too materialistically, just as many Christians do today. The universe will be created anew, and in that renewed order material substance will share the very nature of the glorified body. Isaiah speaks explicitly of "new heavens and a new earth" in Isaiah 65:17 and 66:22...

Nonsense. The Church Fathers never taught that the Church has a different destiny from Israel. They saw one people of God, not two. Paul never says that Israel gets the earth and the Church gets heaven. There aren't two different homelands; there's only one olive tree (Romans 11).

These are mere words, serving a therapeutic purpose at best. Or will you argue, with radical Reformed theologians, that God's glorious governance finds expression in the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the mass starvations under Mao, and the world wars with their millions of victims?

Indeed, the kingdom of God is eschatological. It will become our new homeland at the end of the age, but for now it exists as a heavenly realm.

When questioned by Pilate, Jesus declares: "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36). Christ's kingdom is not embedded in the immanent order. It is a transcendent reality, accessed through vertical participation. This is precisely why the modern, disenchanted worldview, where nature is...

I am not denying the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. That indwelling is vertical participation, the ascent of the creature towards the transcendent God, and it is central to my argument. Nothing in my position contradicts Paul's teaching that the Spirit dwells in the believer. The question at...

According to Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, and Pseudo‑Dionysius divine presence is veiled to allow creatures to exist as creatures. Aquinas and Bonaventure both teach that Creation requires a kind of divine reticence. In Luther's theology God's hiddenness is necessary for faith and for...

Nietzsche claimed that Christianity is nihilism, and he was half right. The Christian movement of alienation and disenchantment divides into two paths: nihilism and heavenly participation. It is clear from Jesus' message that he opens the way to both heaven and hell. I have never claimed that...

The 16th‑century Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria offered a brilliant theological response to a classic paradox: How can an infinite, omnipresent God create a finite world without ceasing to be infinite? If God fills all reality, then there is no "space" (conceptual or otherwise) for anything that is...

This is the mythic perception that Christianity preserves alongside its transcendent perspective, because our imagination can render spirit only through naïve, earthly images. Once, humans imagined themselves living together with the gods. This is a common motif in world religions, expressing...

My three latest articles deal with precisely this. In pagan times, people believed the world was suffused with divine powers. Christianity marks the abolition of that worldview and the turn towards a transcendent perspective.

If God were present in the world in the same way creatures are present then nothing else could truly exist in its own right. A world saturated by divine immediacy would be swallowed by it. Creaturely independence would collapse. Every causal chain, every intention, every movement would be divine...