My article “If God wants to damn your children, should you agree?” elicited a couple notable responses. Walter replied as follows: “I think the riddle is this: what do you do if God’s perfect goodness is so different from human conceptions of goodness that His actions are utterly indistinguishable from what you would normally consider […]
divine nature
Does God choose his nature? The bad implications of a seemingly good idea
I asked Kerry the following: “Do you believe God chooses his nature?” Kerry replied: “Yes I do, as a nod to Anselm’s definition. Something else determining it would be God.” This surprised me. It certainly isn’t a nod to Anselm, though I suspect William of Ockham presently has a twinkle in his eye. Here’s the […]
Could God have chosen to be a maximally perfect liar?
Driven by a concern to protect the absolute divine sovereignty and omnipotence and, presumably, to chasten the pretensions of human modal intuitions, a minority of theologians down through history have followed William of Ockham in rooting the divine attributes not in the divine nature but rather in the divine will. God is so because God chooses to be so. This […]
Why “God hated Esau” is of no use to the Calvinist
Pete asked what a person who believes God is omnibenevolent does with “God hated Esau” (Malachi 1:3; Romans 9:13). There are a number of complexities in these passages. To begin with, there is the fact that the specific individuals Jacob and Esau serve as symbols representing people groups (Israel and Edom, or more broadly, insider and outsider). Second, there is […]
