Sunday, October 17, 2004

My Paper on the Atonement

Click here (link no longer exists) to view my paper on the atonement. I will be updating it throughout the evening.
Cheers,
Guy

posted by Guy @ 9:31 PM   1 comments

1 Comments:

At 5:02 PM, Blogger jona and/or tish said...

Gaius,
interesting paper you have here. i've only got three objections, and i'll make them brief, though if you want to engage me more, we can talk on the phone about them. (1) you spend a lot of time developing the purposes of the atonement, but not a lot of time developing the workings of it. in other words, you leave the reader wondering, yes, but how, or in what manner, was the atonement accomplished? of course, this might have taken you down a tangential path where you did not want or were not prepared to go, e.g. you probably would have had to spend some time talking about anselm's ransom theory of the atonement, etc. (2) you would have been well advised to talk about truly christian epistemology in your discussion of reasoning from created object to creator, or from internal qualities and states in the created being to uncreated, static qualities in the creator. what i mean is that since it is only by the illumination of the holy spirit that we attain to true christian knowledge, that is, a knowledge that pierces past the intellect, it is necessary to make this fact explicit. so while there is use in laying out the sort of argument that you've unfolded, and especially so for the believer, it would have been good to talk about the futility of persuasion by rational argument absent the holy spirit's work in the listener.
(3) guy! the prose! you sound as though you're writing to a 17th century audience and like you co-wrote this paper. you actually wrote this sentence: "Let us begin this inquiry deliberately, that our methodology would reflect wisdom and order and that our results would not be nullified due to futility of method." you have great ideas and a voluminous amount of knowledge to contribute to any philosophical or theological discussion. it's a mistake, though, to take those complex ideas and make them more so by using difficult verbiage. instead, use a more vernacular and simplistic style while maintaining the complexity of the idea. this will help you to avoid needless off-putting among your readers.

 

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