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 »
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 »
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 »
This post is the second 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 previous post I discussed the problem of the One and the Many and why the idea of absolute… Read More »
After a several month blogging hiatus, I’m resuming my eleven-part series responding to the essays in Ben Arbour’s edited volume, Philosophical Essays against Open Theism (Routledge, 2019). In this post I tackle chapter 10 by Ken Perszyk, “Open Theism and the Soteriological Problem of Evil” (pp. 159–177). In this essay Perszyk compares and contrasts Open… Read More »
In 1 John 4:8, the Bible says categorically that “God is love.” This suggests a hypothesis, namely, that love is God’s fundamental essential attribute. Can we plausibly derive all of God’s other essential attributes from the central attribute of love? To do so we need three things: A clear and plausible definition of love or,… Read More »
I have a Ph.D. in Philosophy. Etymologically, ‘philosophy’ means love of wisdom and a ‘philosopher’ is therefore a lover of wisdom. But etymology doesn’t necessarily map onto semantics. Much that is currently labelled ‘philosophy’ is at best only tangentially concerned with wisdom. Indeed, many self-styled philosophers and other credentialed “smart” people promote astonishingly misguided forms… Read More »
This is part 6 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, and part 5.) Chapter 6 is a long chapter that arguably should have been split into two parts—at the very… Read More »
My wife and I were recently charged (indirectly and by email) by a well-meaning Christian brother with being part of an heretical, non-Christian cult. In this post I’m going to rebut the “cult” and “heresy” charges, respectively. Along the way, I’ll make some observations about baptism, faith vs. works, and what counts as “salvation”. I.… Read More »