If you would like to read many reasons for admiring and loving Jesus, then this is the book for you! If you admire and love Jesus but have difficulty identifying yourself as a Christian or have difficulty joining a church because of problems with this or that aspect of Christianity, then this is a book for you, too! Among other things, Love of Jesus points out that Jesus accepted and even encouraged doubters. Important as scholarship is, Love of Jesus is not a scholarly book. Rather, it reaches out to lay people, believers, and non-believers. It takes at face value a wide range of New Testament stories about Jesus and asks of them why we should admire and love the man who inspired them. Then, hoping it has inspired the reader to admire and love Jesus-or to admire and love him even more-Love of Jesus offers answers to the questions, "How should we follow him?" and "How should we relate to one another as Christians when we have different understandings of Christianity?
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Thinking Philosophically begins by helping the reader acquire a lively sense of what philosophy is, how it began, why it persists, and how it is related to other fields of study, especially science.
In this volume, Richard Creel sets forth a thesis that offers a third way to approach divine impassibility. Defining impassibility as imperviousness to causal influence from external factors, Creel sketches a path between Aquinas and Hartshorne, by asserting that once this definition is accepted, one must still distinguish the various respects in which God is or is not impassible. Virtually no one would dispute that the divine nature is impassible. God will never cease to be God, no matter what happens in creation. With respect to the divine knowledge and will, however, there are conflicting views. Creel claims that God's will is impassible because God knows everything that can be accomplished by divine power. Yet, unlike Aquinas, Creel believes that God has this knowledge in virtue of a 'plenum' of possibilities eternally coexistent with the divine being. The absolute is not simply God, but rather God plus the 'plenum'. Creel suggests that God's knowledge is passible with respect to the contingent future actions of creatures. God knows these actions, therefore, not in their presentiality from all eternity, as Aquinas would hold, but only as they happen and become actual. God's will, however, remains immediately impassible because the divine will is ordered to possibilities, not actualities. God never has to wait until after we do something in order to decide his response to it. He has eternally decided his response to all that we might do. Ultimately God's feelings remain impassible, no matter what concrete decisions human beings make, because the basic intent of the divine plan for us is always achieved: we exercise our freedom to choose for or against God. God is impassible with respect to the divine nature, divine will, and divine feelings; but God is passible with respect to the divine knowledge of future contingent events.
In this volume, Richard Creel sets forth a thesis that offers a third way to approach divine impassibility. Defining impassibility as imperviousness to causal influence from external factors, Creel sketches a path between Aquinas and Hartshorne, by asserting that once this definition is accepted, one must still distinguish the various respects in which God is or is not impassible. Virtually no one would dispute that the divine nature is impassible. God will never cease to be God, no matter what happens in creation. With respect to the divine knowledge and will, however, there are conflicting views. Creel claims that God's will is impassible because God knows everything that can be accomplished by divine power. Yet, unlike Aquinas, Creel believes that God has this knowledge in virtue of a 'plenum' of possibilities eternally coexistent with the divine being. The absolute is not simply God, but rather God plus the 'plenum'. Creel suggests that God's knowledge is passible with respect to the contingent future actions of creatures. God knows these actions, therefore, not in their presentiality from all eternity, as Aquinas would hold, but only as they happen and become actual. God's will, however, remains immediately impassible because the divine will is ordered to possibilities, not actualities. God never has to wait until after we do something in order to decide his response to it. He has eternally decided his response to all that we might do. Ultimately God's feelings remain impassible, no matter what concrete decisions human beings make, because the basic intent of the divine plan for us is always achieved: we exercise our freedom to choose for or against God. God is impassible with respect to the divine nature, divine will, and divine feelings; but God is passible with respect to the divine knowledge of future contingent events.
If you would like to read many reasons for admiring and loving Jesus, then this is the book for you! If you admire and love Jesus but have difficulty identifying yourself as a Christian or have difficulty joining a church because of problems with this or that aspect of Christianity, then this is a book for you, too! Among other things, Love of Jesus points out that Jesus accepted and even encouraged doubters. Important as scholarship is, Love of Jesus is not a scholarly book. Rather, it reaches out to lay people, believers, and non-believers. It takes at face value a wide range of New Testament stories about Jesus and asks of them why we should admire and love the man who inspired them. Then, hoping it has inspired the reader to admire and love Jesus-or to admire and love him even more-Love of Jesus offers answers to the questions, "How should we follow him?" and "How should we relate to one another as Christians when we have different understandings of Christianity?
Voted one of Christianity Today's 1995 Books of the Year! The Openness of God presents a careful and full-orbed argument that the God known through Christ desires "responsive relationship" with his creatures. While it rejects process theology, the book asserts that such classical doctrines as God's immutability, impassibility and foreknowledge demand reconsideration. The authors insist that our understanding of God will be more consistently biblical and more true to the actual devotional lives of Christians if we profess that "God, in grace, grants humans significant freedom" and enters into relationship with a genuine "give-and-take dynamic." The Openness of God is remarkable in its comprehensiveness, drawing from the disciplines of biblical, historical, systematic and philosophical theology. Evangelical and other orthodox Christian philosophers have promoted the "relational" or "personalist" perspective on God in recent decades. Now here is the first major attempt to bring the discussion into the evangelical theological arena.
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