Dr Daniel Pedersen

Biography

I came to Aberdeen in 2019 after a prior postdoc at the University of Exeter and an associate fellowship with the University of Texas' Institute for Historical Studies. Prior to that, I worked at Princeton University--both as 'lecturer' and for the Princeton University Chapel--as well as at Princeton Theological Seminary where I earned both my Masters of Divinity in 2011 and my PhD (with distinction) in 2016.

Internal Memberships

Core Faculty Member - Aberdeen Centre for Protestant Theology

Research Overview

My research interests centre around a range of theological, philosophical, and scientific themes. I have published on theological and philosophical accounts of on the doctrine of God, sin and evil, agency, metaethics, aesthetics, and the relationship between theology and science. I have also written on early modern and modern philosophers and theologians from Spinoza and Leibniz to Protestant Scholastics, to Schleiermacher and Tillich, and have interests in many more figures besides.

Current Research

My current research is a co-authored work on evolution, moral evil, and matters of divine blame. This extends out from my past interests in evolution, sin, and value to an almost totally neglected question of how God could blame (and hence forgive) moral evils to which God was party by way of evolution. More than simply theodicy or a question of the compatibility of human agency with evolutionary formation, this project seeks to carefully examine God’s blame for evolutionarily informed moral evils in the context of its fittingness in the divine economy.

Past Research

My past research has involved a range of figures and topics.

For topics, I have focused on the doctrine of God, as well as matters pertaining to evolution and sin. I have, for example, written on divine simplicity and modal collapse, divine freedom and necessity, election, universal salvation, and divine responsibility for evil.

For figures I have focused most on Leibniz and Spinoza and, especially, on the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, about whom I wrote my two previous monographs. But I have also done a great deal of work on Augustine, Aquinas, Protestant Scholastics, and have engaged a range of 20th and 21st century theologians and philosophers.

Books: 

Schleiermacher’s Theology of Sin and Nature: Agency, Value, and Modern Theology, Routledge (2020).

The Eternal Covenant: Schleiermacher on God and Natural Science, De Gruyter (2017).

Featured Articles:

2023          ‘Introduction to the Glaubenslehre & “On the Glaubenslehre”’, in the Oxford Handbook of Friedrich Schleiermacher (forthcoming).   

2022          ‘Divine Simplicity, God’s Freedom, and the Supposed Problem of Modal Collapse’ (co-authored with Christopher Lilley), Journal of Reformed Theology, vol. 22, no 1-2.

2022          ‘“A tragic destiny overtook him”: Misunderstanding the Introduction to Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith and his Letters to Lücke’, International Journal of Systematic Theology, vol. 24, no. 4.

2021          ‘Blame, Damnation, and Evolved Dispositions: A Dilemma’, Modern Theology, vol. 37, no. 2.

2015          ‘Spinoza and Reformed Theologians on God’, Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, vol. 7.

2015          ‘Schleiermacher and Reformed Scholastics on the Divine Attributes’, International Journal of Systematic Theology, vol. 17, No. 4.

2011          ‘Eternal Life in Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith’, International Journal of Systematic Theology vol. 3, no. 2.