Category: Christian Theology

  • Joy and hope

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    In a previous post, I took joy to be happiness with respect to our ultimate good. We also spoke about two ways in which happiness is achieved: through the acquisition of a good or the continued possession of a good. The Aristotelian inside me was unsatisfied with this, for we usually take happiness to be →

  • Independence or community?

    Every now and then I contribute to a Christian magazine published at the University of Cape Town called The Good News. This time round a question was posed to a Christian (me) and an atheist. Each of us were given 350 words to answer it from our respective worldviews. The question this time was, “Were →

  • Middle knowledge or Molinism?

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    [UPDATE: I’ve actually modified the related post since I wrote this one. I’m leaving this post here, though, because I still think it’s got an interesting thought in it] In my recent post on God’s providence I discussed a view which I called “middle knowledge”. To some this might have been confusing, for this position is →

  • God’s control and our free will

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    This is the second post in a series of posts on God’s providence. Last time we looked at a bunch of passages from Scripture which weigh in on the question. This time, as the title suggests, we’re going to talk about the relationship between God’s control and our free will. In our first post, we →

  • World-types have explanations but not grounds?

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    On the one hand I personally like the idea of middle-knowledge for understanding the relationship between God’s providence and our libertarian-free choices[1]. On the other hand, I’m what William Lane Craig once called[2] a latter-day Leibnizian, who wants “everything to be brought into submission to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, including facts concerning human free →

  • Covenantal Modalism

    This probably isn’t a novel idea, but I thought it was worth sharing. I was talking to my friend, Marcus, about various theological topics and at some point the question of the nature of blessing in the Old and New Testaments came up. I was trying very hard to articulate generally how I saw the →

  • Biblical passages dealing with God’s Providence

    Earlier in this blog I promised that I’d do a series on God’s providence. If you look at the “preliminaries” post, the schedule looks like this: Biblical passages that deal with God’s providence God’s control and our free will The question of suffering Why a proper understanding of providence is important Here we attempt the first →

  • Death before the Fall

    Depending on one’s view of Genesis, one might be committed to a position about death before the Fall. Typically, young earth creationists (YECs) hold that there was no animal death before the Fall and there was no human death either. Most old earth creationists (OECs) hold that there was animal death before the Fall. When →

  • Two meta-theological questions

    I’m not entirely sure how the term meta-theology is defined in general, but for the sake of this blog we’re going to define meta-theology as “thinking about theology”. Now sometimes, in systematic theology (defined a little later) we think about things like inerrancy and knowledge about God which, I guess, involve thinking about theology in some →

  • Two problems of revelation

    Every now and then I’ve seen two arguments against religion with regard to revelation. They are the problem of contradicting revelations and the problem of unclear revelation. Now I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t considered these arguments in any detailed way, but as far as I can tell each has a premise →