If there’s a “poster child” of classical theism, it would have to be Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 AD). By the end of only the third question in the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas has concluded that God necessarily exists and is the absolutely simple and purely actual first, uncaused cause of the moment-by-moment being of everything else.… Read More »
All theists believe—or should believe—that God’s existence is necessary in a metaphysically robust sense of “necessary”. How, after all, could we unswervingly commit our lives and our futures to an ontologically fragile God, one who could—try as He might to avoid it—cease to exist? Or one who, because He simply got bored with eternity, commit deicide,… Read More »
In my previous post I contrasted four models of divine providence with respect to the retrospective and prospective problems of evil. Here’s another complementary way of looking at the problem of evil in terms of how each model tries to relieve some of the tension caused by evil by adjusting our understanding of the divine… Read More »
There are two sides to the problem of evil: God’s responsibility for evil God’s response to evil. (1) is retrospective; it has to do with God’s complicity in past occurrences of evil. (2) is prospective; it has to do with God’s ability to respond to evil moving forward—to eliminate evil, to bring good out of… Read More »
In my previous post, I develop what I take to be a refutation of the simple foreknowledge (SF) view. In this post I want to look at little more carefully at that refutation, consider how a proponent of SF might try to get around it, and show that this response does nothing to resolve the… Read More »
In philosophical theology, simple foreknowledge (SF) is the view that Minimal monotheism is true, i.e., there is one, necessarily existing, personal, omniscient, etc. God who freely creates ex nihilo. God is temporally everlasting and therefore has a past, present, and future. The future is causally open, i.e., there are multiple causally possible futures, and therefore… Read More »
Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958) was, and still is, an influential Eastern Orthodox theologian. I recently read an English translation of his book Orthodox Theology: An Introduction (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978) and was surprised to see several unambiguously clear endorsements of the idea that in creating free creatures, God has taken significant risks. That admission alone is… Read More »
Of all the objections that have been made against open theism, one of the most serious ones, to my mind, is the challenge of Church tradition. Simply stated, the objection is that open theism is not only too novel, but also contrary to Church tradition, and is therefore not a viewpoint that Christians should even… Read More »
During the past 8 months, I’ve journeyed from a relatively generic, low-church, broadly Wesleyan Protestantism toward Eastern Orthodoxy. In this post I’ll briefly recount my journey. In follow-up postings I’ll share some thoughts on how Open Theism relates to Church tradition in general and to Eastern Orthodoxy in particular. My initial catalyst for exploring Orthodoxy… Read More »
Introduction It’s been about a year since I last blogged. I plan to get back into it with more consistency. This last year my wife and I became foster parents and subsequently adoptive parents to a little girl (now 3 years old), and that coupled with a few other things has made it hard to… Read More »