Since turning toward Eastern Orthodoxy about three years ago, I’ve become heavily interested in the history of Christianity and, in particular, the Church fathers, those influential individuals of, roughly, the first eight centuries AD who were instrumental in shaping what is now known as “orthodox” Christianity. One of those individuals was Athanasius of Alexandria (c.… Read More »
This is my third and final post on Kirk MacGregor’s book, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures (2022). My first post dealt with chapters 1–3. My second post dealt with chapter 4. This post covers chapters 5–6 and part of the concluding chapter. In Chapter 5 MacGregor defends Molinism’s Biblical credentials against various open theism friendly prooftexts.… Read More »
This is a long-planned continuation of a previous post from several months ago in which I commented on chapters 1–3 of Kirk MacGregor’s book, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures (2022). MacGregor is one of the most active contemporary defenders of Molinism, a fairly popular model of divine providence that aims to reconcile a meticulous model… Read More »
As part of my ongoing research for my book project on Open Theism (under contract with Cambridge Univ. Press), I’ve recently begun reading Kirk MacGregor’s latest book, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures (2022). I’m looking at the book because he addresses some aspects of an anti-Molinist argument that I’ve been developing over the past few… Read More »
Here’s my current breakdown of what I think are the main variants of Open Theism. Briefly, I take Open Theism to affirm at least the following: Open Theism =def. there exists a monotheistic God (understood along theistic personalist or ‘neo-classical’ lines) who has created ex nihilo a Creation that, by God’s design, has a partly… Read More »
This is the 9th and final installment of my series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). (Previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.) In this chapter Todd tackles the “assertion problem” for open futurism. He’s quick to clarify that it’s not… Read More »
This is a reply to a recent critique of open theism by philosopher David Hunt on a YouTube channel called The Analytic Christian. The video interview was mainly focused on an essay Hunt wrote titled “What Does God Know? The Problems of Open Theism”. It was published in 2009 as part of an edited collection,… Read More »
This is part 7 of my ongoing series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). (Previous installments: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6.) This post continues my discussion of Ch.6, focusing on pp. 129–147, which is concerned with… Read More »
Author analogies for different models of providence (somewhat tongue-in-cheek): Theistic Determinism: God as sole author – God writes the whole story without any outside input. He writes only for His own enjoyment, which He calls “glory” for some reason. Creatures are merely characters in the novel. Molinism: God as sole author, but with outside “inspiration”… Read More »
For Christian open theists it is an inconvenient fact of history that the view seems to have been a small minority report until fairly recently. This fact is the basis for one of the most commonly leveled objections against open theism, namely, that it is “too novel”. If open theism is true and supported by… Read More »