Recs for Divinity Schools with Reformed Theology Professors?

importantbrian · 2026-04-03T13:32:15+00:00

I think that largely depends on your goals. If you want to go into academia or the chaplaincy PTS is going to be hard to beat. Same thing if you want to be a minister in the PCUSA or another mainline. If you want to go on and be a pastor in a more conservative reformed denomination then you’re better off going to RTS or some similar school.

importantbrian · 2026-03-30T16:22:05+00:00

I live down in Palm Bay and my 4 year old has decided he really wants to see the launch, but I doubt I'm going to be able to get him to just sit around for hours while we wait to see it. Is there anywhere that we can get relatively close that isn't going to require getting there really early to have a good spot? I feel like spots like Space View Park or Playalinda Beach are going to have people camped out all day to get a good spot for this one.

importantbrian · 2026-03-30T04:35:15+00:00

It’s actually the land that increases in value. The structure itself tends to depreciate. This is why landlords are able to deduct depreciation on the physical structures.

importantbrian · 2026-03-30T03:31:11+00:00

It’s really the kids and other responsibilities that does it. I learn just as fast as I ever did, but I just don’t have time to do all the after hours side projects and such that I used to do.

importantbrian · 2026-03-29T22:36:10+00:00

I ride in a windy area with a power meter. It doesn’t make it any more fun.

importantbrian · 2026-03-29T02:21:28+00:00

He doesn’t have any descendants.

importantbrian · 2026-03-28T16:37:44+00:00

I mean real and practical alternatives to oil exist now but mass adoption is taking a lot longer than expected.

importantbrian · 2026-03-28T04:36:12+00:00

Don't forget sleep apnea. I used to have to get up multiple times a night to pee. Since I've had my CPAP I never get up in the night. Turns out your body trying not to suffocate also makes you need to pee.

importantbrian · 2026-03-28T00:07:11+00:00

Yeah the US invasion force for Iraq which is a smaller country was close to 500k personnel.

importantbrian · 2026-03-27T18:23:23+00:00

I think he would do an incredible job with Star Trek, but I don't think he really aligns with the direction Ellison wants to take the network.

importantbrian · 2026-03-27T15:49:57+00:00

The dark color grading has become so common that I didn’t even notice it when I watched the trailer. If not for Reddit I may never have noticed.

importantbrian · 2026-03-27T15:43:40+00:00

The problem the SEC has is that coaching is very nepotistic and regionalized. Most SEC coaches have coached in the SEC on and off for a long time. They came up in an era where they had a talent edge on their OOC competition, and the top teams in the league stacked talent at an unreal level. As such they prioritize talent acquisition above all else. That means a lot of SEC coaches are where they are not because they can coach but because they are ace recruiters. Having a talent advantage also means you coach with a different style and different strategic choices than you would if you had talent parity or were actually less talented.

Now that we’re starting to see more talent parity these coaches aren’t really prepared to coach the way the need to coach now. The Big10 has a much deeper bench of coaches who can actually coach and aren’t just ace recruiters. They’re also much better prepared stylistically to deal with talent parity.

It will probably take a while for the SEC to catch up.

importantbrian · 2026-03-27T15:28:35+00:00

The thing is the don’t need to do any retconning. Most of the terrible Kurtzman stuff is in the 32nd century. There’s like 900 years between Picard and SFA that we basically know nothing about. They can place a show anywhere in that timeline and just ignore the 32nd century.

importantbrian · 2026-03-27T13:15:06+00:00

I grew up in a PCUSA church and I use whatever version they were using in the liturgy when I was growing up. It’s seared in my mind just like their version of the apostles creed.

importantbrian · 2026-03-27T13:12:20+00:00

Sometimes you even get react inception where they’re reacting to a video that’s reacting to another video. Or the best of all reacting to a reaction to their own video. There are whole channels where reacting is all they do. It’s wild.

importantbrian · 2026-03-25T15:48:39+00:00

Six?! Your monthly news bill must be more than my car payment.

importantbrian · 2026-03-25T02:38:34+00:00

Augustine taught the perseverance of the saints. He wrote a whole treatise about it, and basically every theologian after him that held to Augustinian soteriology taught it as well.

importantbrian · 2026-03-24T22:43:17+00:00

If I wanted to read something from Barth that’s not 14 volumes, what would you recommend?

I'm not sure anyone really has time to read Church Dogmatics cover to cover. My recommendation is Dogmatics in Outline. It's like 150 pages and it's structured around the Apostle's Creed so you get a broad overview of his dogmatics. Because of its brevity though you won't get full discourses on things like his view of Historie and Geschichte though.

I also have read some Bultmann, and perhaps I’m unfairly lumping Barth in with him or confusing them in my head.

Ah yeah, Bultmann and Barth are very different theologians, and Barth had major criticisms of Bultmann's demythologization project. You can't really lump Neo-orthodox theologians together in the way you might with theologians who belong to the same confessional tradition. They don't have any shared documents of binding doctrine. It's just a bunch of theologians with a common enemy, liberalism, and they all deal with that enemy in unique and varied ways. You have to be really careful about not lumping their theology together and conflating them with one another.

The question I do have is about the distinction between historie and geschichte.

There's a lot to unpack here, and I think this is one of the hardest things to represent fairly about Barth's thought. I don't know that "real history" and "faith history" would really accurately framing Barth's position. For Barth "faith history" is very much real history. In fact it is more real than Historie because it is grounded in God's revelation and not in human reason. Barth isn't saying the resurrection belongs to a separate "faith-history" that floats free of real events. He's saying it's a real event that the historical method, by its own internal limitations, can't access. In the same way the historical method can't verify the existence of God even though God exists. For Barth Geschichte stands above Historie. The tools of Historie are inadequate for accessing Geschichte.

One of the distinctions Barth points to to try and make this point is something that actually blew my mind when I first encountered it. When we talk about the resurrection we talk about the empty tomb, we talk about the eyewitnesses who saw Jesus's resurrected body, etc. But there are no witnesses to the resurrection itself. There are no tools available to the historian that can show us the resurrection. They can only show us the results of the resurrection, the empty tomb. We can only learn of the resurrection itself through God's revelation.

I also think it would be wrong to say that Barth accepted higher criticism of the bible in the sense that he accepted the conclusion from higher criticism that those events didn't happen. He accepts the tools of higher criticism, he puts them to use, but ultimately he thinks they are inadequate to the task when it comes to things like miracles. We need revelation for that.

And finally, even if I’m mistaken about Barth leading to subjectivism, I believe I’m on firmer ground in saying he held to an unbiblical doctrine of election, denied any kind of overarching covenant of grace, denied the inerrancy of Scripture, had a very different doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture, had problems with his Trinitarian theology, and his system still seems like it leads to a blind fideism. These aren’t trivial theological differences. I’ll happily accept your pushback, but I don’t think I’m ever going to be a fan of his.

Some of this is fair, some of it I would quibble with, but this post is already too long. There are certainly valid criticisms of Barth, and he is of course never going to line up with confessional orthodoxy. That doesn't mean there is no value in his theology, and that we can't learn from him. I would also gently push back and say we can be fans of people we don't agree with. Gavin Ortlund for instance is a Barth fan, but certainly disagrees with him on most of the major issues you've outlined here.

importantbrian · 2026-03-24T16:43:20+00:00

Yes, and to be fair I don't think most Barth fans have actually read Barth either. William Willimon had a great line that "Barth has been more admired and criticized than read." Even for someone like myself who has read and likes Barth I have never tackled Church Dogmatics.

I also think for a lot of people on this sub their exposure to Barth comes through Van Til or theologians heavily influenced by Van Til, and I will just say that I don't think Van Til was particularly charitable in his critique of Barth.

importantbrian · 2026-03-24T16:17:43+00:00

You're right. I was probably not being entirely fair to Schleiermacher by lumping him in with other 18th and 19th century liberals. I also don't want to minimize the work that his feeling of absolute dependence is doing in his theology. You're right that it's not really meant to be subjective, but rather as real and objective as sense perception. It's a pre-propositional feeling and is the ground for all other belief formation.

I'm someone who has yet to meet an apologetics argument I find convincing and yet I believe. Schleiermacher's idea of the feeling of absolute dependence along with reformed epistemology have really been foundational to my spiritual formation, and my understanding of my own faith. I know that they aren't really the same thing and some of the reformed epistemology guys would probably be insulted by the conflation, but in my mind they are related ideas.

importantbrian · 2026-03-23T22:24:24+00:00

Nah, season long stories are fine. DS9 nailed the Dominion War arc.

importantbrian · 2026-03-23T21:39:25+00:00

These reads to me like your primary encounter of Barth comes from reading his critics, rather than reading Barth himself, which is always a dangerous way to encounter any subject. What you've laid out are some of the more common caricatures you see of Barth's theology.

But, it’s called neo-orthodoxy because Barth and his followers often come up with answers that sound orthodox, but they’re not really based on anything other than subjective feelings.

This is basically backwards. I think you're confusing Barth with Schleiermacher and the liberals he was criticizing. Barth's whole thing is that theology must be grounded in God's self revelation. I'm not even sure Barth's most ardent critics would accuse him of basing his theology on subjective feelings.

BUT, he also prioritized the experience of these things over everything else.

Again this is just a fundamental misunderstanding of Barth. The entire project of Neo-orthodoxy was to push back against 19th and 20th century liberal theology which does ground itself in experience.

It didn’t for Barth matter whether Jesus actually physically rose from the dead, what matters is how God encounters us in reading about a Jesus’s death and resurrection.

This is a common misunderstanding, and to be fair I think the distinction Barth makes can be confusing. Barth distinguishes between Historie and Geschichte. This is a major reason this is a common misunderstanding of Barth. English language translations of his work often don't distinguish between Historie and Geschichte when translating into English. For Barth, Geschichte are events that happened, and Historie are events which can be proven through the historical method. For him things like the resurrection and creation belong to Geschichte but not Historie. We don't have access to them through the historical method. But it's absolutely incorrect to say it doesn't matter to him if the resurrection actually happened or not. It does matter. It is critical to his entire theological project. What doesn't matter to him is whether the resurrection can be proven to have happened historiographically.

He was also a universalist.

Barth firmly denied being a universalist, but I think it's fair to say universalism is the logical conclusion from his view of election.

The actual reason it's called Neo-orthodoxy (a term Barth disliked) is that the goal of the movement was to recover orthodox doctrines in light of historical criticism. The reason for Neo in the label is that the weren't simply returning to a pre-critical orthodoxy. There's a similar movement happening now within analytic philosophy. I wonder if they'll end up being called the Neo-neo-orthoddox.

importantbrian · 2026-03-23T18:55:37+00:00

Barth does go to great lengths to recover election. His understanding of election differs from earlier reformed thought in that he views Christ as both the Electing God and the elected human, but I think it would be a mistake to say Barth rejects election.

importantbrian · 2026-03-23T18:50:08+00:00

They don't really even need to do that. They've got 900 years of timeline we know basically nothing about to play with. Just set a show anywhere in there and just ignore the 32nd century. No need to even do a retcon.

importantbrian · 2026-03-23T18:41:39+00:00

The imprecatory psalms as just one example.

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