We have come to the end! The last seminar of the year and of the AT project at Fuller. For those of you who have been with us from the beginning, this is something like 60 seminars with speakers from around the country and the globe.
As the penultimate seminar speaker of the entire Analytic Theology Project, we were delighted to welcome Fuller’s own Dr. Kutter Callaway. In his talk, “Experimental Theology: Theological Anthropology in Conversation with the Sciences,” Callaway explored directly the “conversational” aspect of our research project, viz., what we mean by deploying this term, how it describes the normal use/misuse of varying disciplines in an interdisciplinary project, and what sort of method might better be used to go beyond mere conversation.
Very much of Christian teaching is not empirically verifiable — for instance, the doctrines of Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement certainly are not — but for some time the claim has been made that at least one core doctrine is. Various figures in recent Christian history have made the affirmation that Christian teaching about Original Sin is empirically verifiable, though they have not made great efforts to try to prove their point. This is where Dr. Jesse Couenhoven’s paper comes in.
According to Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) we now have empirical support that humans are naturally inclined to interpret their environment religiously. What should we do with this discovery? In other words, what is Cognitive Science of Religion and how should it inform theological method? These questions provided the outline for Dr. Myron Penner’s recent lecture to the Analytic Theology group at Fuller Seminary.
Kendrick Lamar, the Los Angeles based rapper, achieved a feat toward which many artists strive: a #1 Billboard charting hit. What made this hit unique was its subject matter—Humility—a subject not typically associated with rap music. In this song K-Dot (as Kendrick is affectionately known) enjoins other rappers to “sit down, be humble,” all while he raps about the greatness of his own skills.
Coming in with home court advantage at our April 25th Analytic Theology seminar was Fuller’s own Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen (affectionately known around Fullerland as “VMK”). VMK proffered an exposition of—his term—“multidimensional monism” (MDM) as an account of human nature.
One plausible implication of a thoroughly physicalist understanding of human beings is that humans do not have the sort of robust freedom that libertarians about free will suggest is needed for moral responsibility.
A person who spends some significant amount of time studying philosophy and theology very quickly learns that language can be tricky. It is quite difficult to speak clearly and precisely about the things with which these domains are concerned. For that reason, clarity and precision of expression are two centrally important virtues of any work of analytic philosophy or theology.
In our first blog, we summarized Helen De Cruz’s recent presentation of a Transmission Model of original sin. We also looked at a possible problem with her attempt to reappropriate Joseph Henrich’s use of the Price Equation.
2018 marks the third year of the Analytic Theology project at Fuller. This year’s theme is theological anthropology. It would have been unfortunate if the year had passed without anyone addressing the question of humanity’s struggle with sin. Happily, this topic was boldly engaged by Dr. Helen De Cruz in a presentation titled, “Transmission of Original Sin: A Cultural Evolutionary Model.”
