The recent revelation that Mother Teresa of Calcutta suffered from long periods of spiritual desolation in which she felt utterly abandoned by God has—to say the least—met with a mixed response from the media.
Jaroslav Pelikan was not a historian easy to characterize. Most historians of Christianity pick some small subfield from the past, which becomes the focus of their research and writing. The really good historians will push back the boundaries of what is known in their subfield or find new and imaginative ways to read old evidence from it.
Christians, who confess that their God is the “Maker of heaven and earth” and the “Creator of all things visible and invisible,” support what looks for all the world like intelligent design. Christians have always brushed aside the notion that the world is a random concatenation of miscellaneous atoms thrown together by no one in particular and serving no purpose other than their own survival. The first article of the Christian creed could not be clearer: the world exists by the will of God.
What less conservative Christians are not committed to is the idea that intelligent design excludes the possibility of evolution.
Books
The Theology of Thomas Aquinas
Rik Van Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow, eds.
Holy Teaching: Introducing the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas has had a long but, on the whole, not very happy history among Protestants. While some early Protestant reformers were well versed in Thomistic theology, Martin Luther was not among them.
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