Yesterday Justin Schieber tweeted some questions regarding Jesus, Noah, and Lot and his wife and he tagged me requesting a reply: Christian bloggers,If you have a moment, I'd love a post addressing these two questions:Thanks! pic.twitter.com/HhVqHRf51O — Real Atheology Podcast (@RealAtheology) May 22, 2017 Being the obliging chap that I am, I briefly tweeted a […]
omniscience
The omniscient God as the jilted lover
In “God in the terrifying image of a jilted lover” I provided some reasons why readers of the Bible should not interpret descriptions of God’s tumultuous emotional life literally. The focus of my analysis in that article was to point out how this yields a picture of God as unpredictable, emotionally needy, and threatening. In […]
Atheist Arguments and Uncritical Anthropomorphism
A couple days ago Justin Schieber tweeted the following sentiment: “A lack of privacy in principle surely has some weight in the question of whether we should want God to exist.” The great thing about a pithy tweet like this is that it succinctly summarizes a very common objection to God’s existence. Apparently there is […]
Should you hope God doesn’t exist so you can have some privacy? (Part 1)
If I’m ever at a loss for what to talk about, my twitter feed always delivers. Today Justin Schieber tweeted the following: “A lack of privacy in principle surely has some weight in the question of whether we should want God to exist.” I have two responses to this tweet. The first response will be […]
Did Jesus know absolutely everything?
Don’t ever say I shy away from the hard questions. Here’s a slide from my upcoming lecture on fifth century Christology:
Why Jesus almost certainly had some errant theological beliefs
The discussion thread to my article “Eric Seibert on biblical violence and the Canaanites” includes an interesting discussion between Geoff and Steven Jake regarding whether Jesus may have had false beliefs, and in particular false theological beliefs. I don’t believe Jesus had any false theological beliefs about matters of soteriological import. In other words, Jesus knew […]
The fallible Jesus?
The question of the knowledge (and ignorance) of Jess exploded back onto the blog this week when Andy Derksen commented the following in my article “How many wrong beliefs did Jesus have?” unless Jesus was in fact wrong about his very identity and mission(!) … whatever he actually *taught* as recorded in the gospels–including statements that have […]
Did Jesus ever have an idol?
My colleague Jerry wrote that I have “some wrong ideas about God, and by my definition, that is idolatrous.” Uh oh. Fortunately then Jerry added “But I’m sure I have some wrong ideas about God too (though, of course, I don’t know what they are right now), and therefore also idolatrous.” Well Jerry, you’d know […]
How many wrong beliefs did Jesus have?
In a recent blog post I discussed the question of theistic evolution and the beliefs of first century Jews about the creation narrative. There I argued that the inconsistency between the beliefs of those individuals, even of Jesus himself, and evolution is not an insuperable problem to an evolutionary account of human origins. As I […]
Can Jesus make a better Caesar salad than my wife?
An earlier version of this article was posted at The Christian Post in 2009. Yesterday I was at the dinner table with my wife and daughter eating a tasty meal. As I crunched the crispy romaine lettuce dressed with croutons, parmesan cheese, lemon juice and the rest, I exclaimed to my daughter, “Nobody can make […]
Could Jesus have given the wrong theological answer?
Many Christians are happy (or at least willing) to recognize that Jesus had ignorance of certain matters. For example, he couldn’t have told you that London will host the 2012 Olympics or that Transformers 3 would clean up at the box office. But that willingness to embrace Jesus being ignorant suddenly seems to exaporate when […]
