William C. Placher

Christ Takes Our Place Rethinking Atonement

Contemporary challenges—feminist and others—force us to rethink traditional doctrines of the atonement. Although René Girard and Jon Levenson open interesting avenues of interpretation, precisely how Christ takes the place of sinners and thereby saves us remains to be explained.

Teaching Christian Theology

Three scholars present narrative descriptions of their syllabi for the first year course in theology. David Goatley discusses the challenges of teaching theology amid the many kinds of diversity characteristic of Memphis Theological Seminary and emphasizes the importance of teaching students how to think theologically. Amy Plantinga Pauw describes the strengths and ongoing problems of an introductory course at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary which combines theology and church history. Linda Woodheads account of teaching Christian theology in a religious studies context at Lancaster University focuses on the embodiedness of theology as key to teaching students for whom it really is a foreign language. Surveying the other essays, William Placher notes positive news about the place of Christian theology within a religious studies department and the ongoing challenges faced in many seminaries of teaching theology in less time to less well prepared students.

An engagement with Marilyn McCord Adams's Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God

I may have agreed to review this work under false pretenses. In a book I wrote called The Domestication of Transcendence , and elsewhere, I raised two sorts of objections to many of the contemporary discussions of the problem of evil among Anglo-American philosophers of religion. First, they often defend an abstract philosophical theism which I think has quite different implications from Christianity, or for that matter from Judaism or Islam or any other major world religion. So, as a Christian theologian, I find myself doubting that their detailed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments they consider is really worth the trouble, given that the results may not have much to do with what religious folk actually believe.