Adventures in the Spirit: Building a New Architecture for Christian Doctrine w/ Philip Clayton

About this episode

The episode features a discussion with Philip Clayton about his theological ideas and the architecture of Christian doctrine.

Philip Clayton has been one of the most important conversation partners in my theological life — we literally worked out some of this stuff together at Claremont — so sitting down with him to trace the whole architecture of his thought from the beginning felt less like an interview and more like a reunion at the whiteboard. We started where Philip started: the secular believer, that figure he described in his Yale dissertation who carries doubt not as a problem to be solved before the real theology begins, but as the very medium through which faith moves. From there we mapped his six-level structure for how beliefs actually work — spoiler: about five percent of what Christians believe falls into the "demonstrably true" category, and the rest is a lot more interesting and honest than most of us admit. Philip walked us through what he learned from Pannenberg about doctrine as hypothesis, the racetrack-and-motorcycle story behind his concept of theological "traction," and why the shift from reductionism to emergence in contemporary science matters so much for anyone trying to think seriously about God and the world. We got into panentheism — why it's more compelling than classical…

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Tripp Fuller

Guest: Philip Clayton

Topics covered

• Christian doctrine
• theology
• faith and doubt
• panentheism
• emergence in science
• theological structure

Keywords

• Christianity
• theology
• faith
• doctrine
• panentheism
• emergence
• Pannenberg
• secular believer
• theological traction

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Claremont, Yale

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