Back in 2011, I wrote a paper called “The Fivefold Openness of the Future” in which I argued that if the future is causally open (i.e., not wholly causally determined) then there are strong reasons to think that it is ontically, alethically, epistemically, and providentially open as well. In my 2024 book Open Theism I strengthened… Read More »
The Unity of the Church What defines, or rather, what should define, the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” Church? In what does the unity of the Christian Church (chiefly) consist? One can find many different answers to this question depending on whom one asks, but most answers can be categorized under four main headings: (1)… Read More »
A few months ago I wrote a post exploring an aporetic triad related to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. In this post I want to approach the topic from a different angle by considering three different models of the Trinity. By “the Trinity” I mean a tri-personal version of monotheism such as is depicted… Read More »
Prominent Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig recently (2016) published a book God over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism (Oxford) focused on divine aseity, i.e., the idea that God exists a se, from Himself alone. Aseity is a standard commitment of monotheism. It means that nothing is more fundamental than God… Read More »
I’ve thought a lot about the Christian doctrine of the Trinity over the years. I’m persuaded that the core of the doctrine is coherent and true, but there are three commonly affirmed trinitarian theses that I see no way to reconcile. Indeed, they constitute an aporetic triad. It’s a triad because there are three claims… Read More »
Linda Zagzebski, a distinguished philosopher who recently retired from the University of Oklahoma, has written a book titled Fatalism and the Logic of Time (Oxford, 2024). This book is a culmination of many years of reflection on the challenges posed by fatalistic arguments. Thirty-five years previously she wrote a well-received book titled The Dilemma of… Read More »
This post is about the essence–energies distinction, that is, the distinction between God’s essence and God’s energies. The distinction is central to Eastern Orthodox theology, but is largely ignored and often denied in Western Christianity. So what gives? What is this distinction supposed to be? Why do Eastern Christians think it’s vitally important? And why… Read More »
If one starts with absolute simplicity, then the only way to develop trinitarianism is to view the divine Persons as relations of the simple divine essence (e) to itself. We might, for example, think of the Father, Son, and Spirit in terms of the three relations entailed by identity. Thus, the Father is a monadic… Read More »
A frequent reply to foreknowledge / future contingency incompatibility arguments is that something must be wrong with all such arguments simply because “foreknowledge isn’t causal” and so cannot constrain our freedom. Thus, William Lane Craig writes: “No matter how ingenious the argument, fatalism [i.e., the incompatibilist’s argument] must be wrong. For it posits a constraint… Read More »
This post is the third in a series on a recent book by James D. Gifford, Jr. titled The Hexagon of Heresy: A Historical and Theological Study of Definitional Divine Simplicity (Wipf & Stock, 2022). In the first post I discussed the problem of the One and the Many and why the idea of absolute… Read More »