Inquiring About God Volume 1 Selected Essays

Inquiring about God is the first of two volumes of Nicholas Wolterstorff's collected papers. This volume collects Wolterstorff's essays on the philosophy of religion written over the last thirty-five years. The essays, which span a range of topics including Kant's philosophy of religion, the medieval (or classical) conception of God, and the problem of evil, are unified by the conviction that some of the central claims made by the classical theistic tradition, such as the claims that God is timeless, simple, and impassible, should be rejected. Still, Wolterstorff contends, rejecting the classical conception of God does not imply that theists should accept the Kantian view according to which God cannot be known. Of interest to both philosophers and theologians, Inquiring about God should give the reader a lively sense of the creative and powerful work done in contemporary philosophical theology by one of its foremost practitioners.

This volume brings together Nicholas Wolterstorff's essays on epistemology written between 1983 and 2008.

Starting from the assumption that 'time is the horizon of the meaning of Being' (Heidegger), Eternal God/ Saving Time attempts to discover what the central religious idea of eternity or of God as 'the Eternal' might mean today. Negotiating ideas of divine timelessness and sempiternity (everlastingness) as well as the attempts of some philosophers to develop the idea of a temporal God, Professor George Pattison surveys a range of positions from analytic philosophy and from the continental tradition from Spinoza through Hegel to the present. Intellectual and cultural forces have tended to separate time and eternity, and both philosophical and theological examples of this tendency are examined. Nevertheless, starting from the experience of life in time, some modern thinkers have developed a new approach to the Eternal as what grounds or gives time. This leads through ideas of novelty, utopia, hope, promise, and call to the projection of a creative and transformative memory-remembering the future-that affirms human solidarity and mutual responsibility. Even if this cannot be made good in terms of knowledge, it offers a basis for hope, prayer, and commitment and these options are explored through a range of Christian, Jewish, Greek, and secular thinkers. This development re-envisages the idea of redemption, away from the Augustinian view that time is what we need to be rescued from and towards the idea that time itself might save us from all that is destructive and tyrannical in time's rule over human life.

The church needs good theology that engages the head, heart, and hands. This four-volume work combines rigorous historical and theological scholarship with application and practicality—characterized by an accessible, Reformed, and experiential approach. In this volume, Joel R. Beeke and Paul M. Smalley explore the first two of eight central themes of theology: revelation and God.

The classical doctrine of God expresses that the God of the Bible is triune, a se, simple, immutable, impassible, eternal, and the sovereign Lord over his creation, which he created from himself. Modern streams of theology, within the evangelical circle, continue to promote a doctrine of God that sharply contrasts the classical view--the traditional view of God in Christian theism. Therefore, a critical response to such a theology is needed. This study is a comprehensive analysis and sustained critique of Thomas Jay Oord's open/relational doctrine of God. Oord's model substitutes process metaphysics for classical metaphysics, while attempting to retain foundational Christian doctrines that were established within a classical metaphysical framework.

The rise of modern science and the proclaimed 'death' of God in the nineteenth century led to a radical questioning of divine action and authorship - Bultmann's celebrated 'demythologizing'. Remythologizing Theology moves in another direction that begins by taking seriously the biblical accounts of God's speaking. It establishes divine communicative action as the formal and material principle of theology, and suggests that interpersonal dialogue, rather than impersonal causality, is the keystone of God's relationship with the world. This original contribution to the theology of divine action and authorship develops a fresh vision of Christian theism. It also revisits several long-standing controversies such as the relations of God's sovereignty to human freedom, time to eternity, and suffering to love. Groundbreaking and thought-provoking, it brings theology into fruitful dialogue with philosophy, literary theory, and biblical studies.

The claim that God is timeless has been the majority view throughout church history. However, it is not obvious that divine timelessness is compatible with fundamental Christian doctrines such as creation and incarnation. Theologians have long been aware of the conflict between divine timelessness and Christian doctrine, and various solutions to these conflicts have been developed. In contemporary thought, it is widely agreed that new theories on the nature of time can further help solve these conflicts. Do these solutions actually solve the conflict? Can the Christian God be timeless? The End of the Timeless God sets forth a thorough investigation into the Christian understanding of God and the God-world relationship. It argues that the Christian God cannot be timeless.