Open theism

THE HIDDENNESS OF GOD Divine hiddenness, in the modern sense, does not refer to disquiet, disappointment and even despair that believers sometimes feel when God seems silent during suffering or trying seasons of life, rather it refers to a philosophical argument that asserts the unbelief of people who are both capable of believing and non-resistant to God proves that a loving God does not exist. Michael Rea puts it this way, “Our concept of God is the concept of a perfectly rational, perfectly…

Relational Holiness in Wynkoop Almost immediately following John Wesley’s death his essential teaching, Christian perfection, was being redefined by his contemporaries in more strictly western theological conceptions than Wesley had ever intended. As has already been seen, Wesley was more profoundly impacted by the teaching of the Eastern Orthodox Fathers than those of the Western Church. Nearly 200 years after Wesley, Mildred Bangs Wynkoop sought to reclaim the core of his conception of…

Banksy is a well-known graffiti artist who made his debut in Britain. Although he is quite popular, there is little to be known on Banksy’s identity and background beyond what is interpreted from his artworks. Through his artwork, Banksy is able to display his views and opinions, change how art is viewed and what meanings people find in them, and also change the way in which art is made and what the artist wants to portray. Banksy’s art is usually based on one idea and his popularity usually…

Christianity which had been eluding me for so long. In this course, I found that the topics of Classical Christian Theism, Deism, Traditionalism, New Age Philosophy, and Postmodernism had all influenced my own, current understanding. And, through studying these, I realized how I had arrived at my current beliefs, and how to continue my journey for truth. Growing up, Classical Christian Theism was my dominant…

against unbelief and superstition.” Basically what he is trying to say is that both science and religious faith are going about the same way in what their main purposes are. They are both trying to get rid of disbelief and arrogance and for people to open their minds. Science must root itself in faith that the universe is a rationally methodical entirety of things. This is the implicit faith that the universe is rational and the mind can understand this rational universe. The connection of…

Simple Foreknowledge and the idea of hard and soft facts, even though it is supposedly a “simple” view of God’s foreknowledge is a very hard view to understand. However, the middle knowledge, or Molinistic view tries to explain Gods foreknowledge through a belief in counterfactuals and three different types of knowledge that God has. A counterfactual is a conditional statement, or as explained by William Lane Craig, are statements that “are antecedent or consequent clauses [that] are typically…

Schelling's assessment of religious representations is grounded on the combination of such a metaphysics of participation and the doctrine of potencies. This follows, insofar as these representations are the fruits of our participation in God’s creativity and in that they must be explained as living expressions of the three potencies. According to Schelling, the three prime principles or three potencies are “what serve as a mediation between the empirical being and the prime cause [God]”. As we…

Since the fall of mankind from the Garden of Eden people have questioned the existence of God, and today that is still relevant and a highly debated topic. There are two types of people in this world; people who believe in God’s existence and people who do not believe there is an almighty God. The people who do not believe in god justify their beliefs by asking if God does exist why is there evil still in the world? Many of these questions will never be answered until we are faced to face with…

The theistic worldview maintains that the universe was created by a perfect being who continues to actively observe it. Conversely, the atheistic worldview avows to a belief in the existence of only the materialistic world, which they contend was not created by a supernatural being. Non-believers commonly employ arguments that are grounded in the problem of evil to dispute the theist’s divine creator. The problem of evil elicits the question of how a perfect and loving God could allow evil, such…

who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere -‘Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,’ as Herbert says, ‘fine nets and stratagems.’ God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous” (191). To every realm of literature he turned he could not escape the Lord and inevitably, as was God’s plan, he discovered the reasonability of theism and embraced…