A number of problems arise when assessing the nature and occurrence of miracles. Some problems arise from views of divine action. There’s also the fact that people’s belief in miracles can be explained psychologically, belief in miracles seems influenced by culture, and some may simply reflect the trickery of religious hucksters. Other problems emerge when science offers convincing explanations that oppose miracles. These problems have led a fair number of theologians and everyday people of faith to reject the category of miracles altogether.

Is Belief in Miracles Culturally Conditioned?

People in some cultures—often non-Western—seem more apt to witness miracles. Advocates for believing in literal miracles and their allies sometimes complain that those who don’t witness miracles must be blinded by modern culture, science, and Western enlightenment.

To people skeptical of miracles, however, the fact that those in less scientifically developed cultures witness more miracles indicates that some people are less advanced. If they just understood the world better, goes the thinking, they’d witness fewer events they’d call miraculous. Ironically, both advocates for miracles and deniers point to the influence of science and culture when assessing whether miracles actually happen.

Personality and personal preference also influence belief. Theists attracted to the dramatic and sensational seem more likely to believe in miracles. By contrast, reserved and restrained theists in general prove less likely to believe.

As like-minded people congregate, confirmation bias grows. Those who believe in miracles form groups of individuals who—not surprisingly—witness numerous miracles. Those who don’t believe form groups who tend to conclude that miracles never or rarely occur. Many Pentecostal congregations would be examples of the first; many Presbyterian congregations give examples of the second. The Catholic church contains significant numbers of people huddled within their own groups.

Some people try to prove miracles exist. But some miracles turn out to be hoaxes, hysteria, or misunderstandings. Dishonest faith healers and shifty evangelists can trick the faithful, and this adds support to the view of some skeptics that all miracles must be fake. Suggestibility can incline some people to believe they, or others, have been healed when they haven’t been—especially when respected religious authorities do the suggesting.[1] In addition, many healing miracles just can’t be objectively verified by qualified experts such as medical doctors.[2]

Interpretation Matters

The above issues point to the role human interpretation plays in miracles. How we each understand reality depends on a host of factors, both within us and in our environments. Two people believing in God could stand side by side and witness an event, and one calls it miraculous, while the other doesn’t. One appeals to special divine action, the other points to natural causes. Diverse interpretative frameworks largely explain these differing explanations.

Perspective matters. People’s view of miracles can also be altered over time. Sometimes, an extraordinary event convinces one not inclined to believe in miracles to begin believing. Other times, someone who once embraced the miraculous decides science, medicine, or other factors offer better explanations. None of us remain locked into our current perspective of God and life. People change.

Defining Miracles

Given the factors I’ve noted, defining miracles can prove difficult. Writers of scripture tell stories of signs, wonders, and extraordinary events, but they don’t clearly define the miraculous, or explain how it works. Consequently, definitions among theologians vary.

Most theologians assume God must be the sole cause at play in the miraculous. Thomas Aquinas says, “God alone” does miracles, for instance, and they are “beyond the order of created nature.”[3] Martin Luther says miracles are “wrought by God alone.”[4] Charles Hodge defines a miracle as “an event in the external world brought about by the immediate efficiency or simple volition of God, without the mediation of natural secondary causes.”[5]

This emphasis on solitary divine causation becomes even more accentuated by the explicit denial of creaturely causation. “A miracle is a suspension or control of the established laws of nature,” says Adam Clarke.[6] The New Catholic Encyclopedia says a miracle is “an event which lies outside the normal pattern of physical causes and is attributed to the immediate action of God, who thereby manifests the supernatural.” “Miracles represent God’s invasive grace,” says Cheryl Bridges John, “moments in which the Spirit disrupts ordinary experience to reveal divine compassion and restore creation.”[7] Others speak of God’s “intervention”[8] in, or “interruption”[9] of, creation’s causation. I’ve discussed the problems with appeals to external intervention in earlier chapters.

It’s one thing to claim an event can’t be explained by natural causes alone. Every theologian who says God must be a necessary cause for each event should affirm that claim. But most definitions of miracles say that God alone brought about some result, irrespective of nature. Words like “intervene,” “interrupt,” and “invade” imply that an omnipotent God occasionally shows up where previously absent to secure an outcome singlehandedly.[10]

Problems with Miracles as Traditionally Understood

The Problem of Selective Miracles

The way most theologians define miracles leads to numerous problems. One of the most egregious I call “the Problem of Selective Miracles.” It arises because people who pray for miracles usually don’t get them. The vast majority of requests to God seem to go unanswered, in the sense that those praying don’t get miraculous results for others or themselves.[11] Even saints in scripture weren’t healed, although they requested it.[12] “The complete absence of miracles in my life when they should have been abundant,” says Stephen Bradford Long, “led me to question the veracity of all miracle claims.[13]”

The problem of selective miracles stems from believing God must be omnipotent. If deity were all-powerful and all-loving, we’d expect many more miracles than we witness. Christine Overall states the issue well: “In choosing to favor just a few individuals, God shows himself to be arbitrary in his beneficence to some and cruel and unfair in his neglect of others.”[14] Apparently, the omnipotent God doesn’t care enough to help consistently.

Those who say God alone does miracles often use the word “supernatural” to describe divine action. The word has several meanings, but saying a miracle occurs supernaturally sounds like an omnipotent God occasionally controls creatures or creation in some unnatural way. Supernatural suggests God overrides or disrupts the natural course of events.[15]

The Problem of Evil

The second problem with miracles as traditionally understood is similar to the first. Instead of asking why an omnipotent deity doesn’t do more miracles, however, it wonders why God doesn’t use those miracle-working abilities to prevent evil in the first place. The kind of power God uses to do miracles, “acting alone,” could stop unnecessary suffering and pointless pain. What kind of God refrains from helping the oppressed and hurting?

“It would seem strange that no miraculous intervention prevented Auschwitz or Hiroshima,” says Maurice Wiles on this point, “while the purposes apparently forwarded by some of the miracles acclaimed in traditional Christian faith seem trivial by comparison.”[16] If God miraculously shortens the line at Starbucks or finds a parking place for someone, we might ask, why doesn’t deity stop genocides? If God can cure grandma’s arthritis, why doesn’t deity use that ability to prevent your sister’s rape, control the spread of global viruses, oust oppressive political tyrants, or stop the ravages of climate change?

The problems associated with miracles heighten when connected to “faith healers.” When a charismatic pastor claims to have the gift of healing but fails to use every waking moment walking up and down hospital halls healing everyone, we wonder whether the person loves consistently. After all, they could be doing much more than they currently are. A deity who could control all entities or interrupt natural processes, but didn’t do it to help the hurting, would love even less consistently.

Most theologians say God never grows tired. But when evil events occur, we understandably assume an omnipotent deity must be asleep on the job. Or just doesn’t love lots of hurting people. This view of God creates massive problems for people who earnestly seek divine help but fail to receive it.

Problem of Scientific Explanation

There’s also an intellectual problem with which many struggle. Most definitions of miracles say God ignores, interrupts, or overrides natural causes. Miracles involve “a suspension or control of the established laws of nature,” says Adam Clarke.[17] Contemporary scholars often cite the 18th century philosopher David Hume as tying miracles to the suspension of natural laws,[18] but Aquinas also said miracles go “beyond the order of created nature.”[19]

A tension arises between claims about miracles and scientific explanations. If God occasionally determines outcomes singlehandedly, scientists who point to natural causes for those outcomes will be wrong, by definition.[20] They won’t be able to give any natural account of a miracle if God is the sole and supernatural cause.[21] This proves empirically problematic, and it undermines the process of science.

In addition, we have the issue that most who claim to observe miracles, if asked, could also identify creaturely causes at play. When defined as events beyond or overriding nature, therefore, miracles aren’t just problematic for scientific explanation; they stand at odds with the typical explanations of everyday people.

A theological problem also arises when we call miracles “interventions.” This way of talking implies that God normally resides outside nature and then “enters into” a closed system of natural causes. To say God “invades” also undermines claims about the Spirit’s continual and necessary causation alongside and in creation. It implicitly says God isn’t universally present.

Problems with Non-Traditional Definitions of Miracles

Given the problems that arise with the traditional definitions of miracles, it’s not surprising some have offered alternative definitions. In fact, I’ll be providing my own. Before doing so, though, I want to look at other alternatives to the traditional view of miracles. I’ll identify problems with each of these too.

Is Everything Miraculous?

One response to traditional definitions of miracles says all events are miracles, and all of life is miraculous. Albert Einstein explains this approach. “There are only two ways to live your life,” says Einstein. “One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”[22] He recommends the second way. Paul Tillich argues for the idea that all of life is miraculous when he says, “Being itself is the true miracle, the ongoing act in which God sustains the world.”[23]

But saying everything is miraculous faces major problems. First, it doesn’t fit either biblical or common views that assume some events are extraordinary and others aren’t. To most people, miracles are isolated incidents, not ubiquitous.

There’s an even more important problem, and it’s moral. Saying all events are miraculous means horrifically evil ones must be miracles too. On this definition, the Nazi Holocaust and the Russian Gulags were miracles, as was every genocide in history. All instances of sexual abuse, deceit, murder, humiliation, and destruction would be miracles if all that happens is miraculous. Saying everything is a miracle risks trivializing evil.

We shouldn’t say everything is a miracle.

Is Nothing is Miraculous?

Einstein’s other option says, “nothing is a miracle.” Given the problems I’ve outlined of selective miracles, the problem of evil, and scientific obstacles associated with traditional views, it’s not surprising that some people of faith deny miracles altogether. Biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann takes this position when he says, “[The] modern man . . . ​does not acknowledge miracles because they do not fit into his lawful order. When a strange or marvelous accident occurs, he does not rest until he has found a rational cause.”[24]

When we can give plausible natural explanations for sensational events traditionally thought to be miraculous, we’re tempted to believe miracles never occur. A crying statue of a saint might be thought miraculous, for instance, until a scientist explains condensation. The miraculous exorcism of a person thought demon-possessed can apparently be duplicated with a few pills from the psychiatrist’s prescription. And so on. When naturalistic explanations sound more plausible than supernatural ones, it’s easy to assume science explains away all miracles.

Saying nothing is miraculous faces problems too, however. First, it dismisses the experience many people have that some events in life are extraordinarily and surprisingly good. Saying “nothing is miraculous” flattens life, ignoring the wild and often wonderful diversity of existence.

Second, denying miracles can lead to thinking God isn’t active in the world. Despite their many problems, at least traditional claims about miracles support belief in the activity of deity. Extraordinarily good events can remind us of an extraordinarily good Lover.

We don’t need deny all miracles, but we do need a plausible account of them.

Are Miracles Just in Our Heads?

Another modern option for understanding miracles capitalizes on the fact that we all interpret the world through our own experience. No one knows the full truth of an event or can be certain of the truthfulness of their interpretation. Given this, some say miracles are entirely a believer’s subjective assessment, irrespective of what actually occurred or what God does. Miracles are just in our heads.

Friedrich Schleiermacher is often cited as advocating this view. He says a miracle “is simply the religious name of an event” that “refers purely to the mental condition of the observer.”[25] Edward Schillebeeckx seems to agree: “A miracle is . . . ​a human experience interpreted as God’s salvation.”[26] Those who understand omnipotence as meaning God controls all things say “miracle” is simply a label we give some events. But all events are entirely caused by deity.[27]

Admittedly, this view of miracles has advantages. It acknowledges the role interpretation plays for making sense of life. It rejects certainty and avoids claiming that God breaks natural laws. This way of understanding the miraculous also seems to account for why people in some cultures or with certain kinds of personalities seem more inclined to witness miracles.

Saying miracles must be entirely a matter of our subjective interpretation presents problems, however. It undermines the realism we need for science, morality, and everyday life. If we claim miracles are just in our heads, perhaps everything else is just in our heads. If reality is whatever we decide it will be, extreme relativism and skepticism arise.

Saying all miracles can be entirely explained by our subjectivity also dismisses extraordinary events that make an objective difference in the world. Sometimes the sick experience healing unexpectedly, for instance. Sometimes the visually impaired begin to see. Sometimes those pronounced dead on an operating table revive, to everyone’s surprise. Sometimes cancer disappears without medical explanation. Some events are extraordinarily good, and they rightly prompt us to wonder about the activity of an extraordinarily good God.

We have reason to think we sometimes witness extraordinary and objectively good events.

A Better Definition of Miracles

To deny miracles altogether means denying an important feature of existence.[28] We can’t easily dismiss the vast numbers of people throughout history who say they’ve witnessed a miracle. Some miracle stories in scripture or told today are likely not historically true, of course, but others likely are. An adequate systematic theology of love should, therefore, account for authentic miracles.

To overcome the problems we encounter with traditional and alternative views of miracles, we need a new and viable definition of miracles. Below I give my simple proposal. Following it, I explain what the definition entails:

A miracle is an extraordinary, good event that involves divine and creaturely causation.

Miracles are Extraordinary

Instead of saying everything is a miracle, we should reserve the word only for exceptional, unusual, or atypical events. Saying every event is a miracle collapses the exceptional into the commonplace. Worse, it risks identifying horrors and holocausts as miracles. Neither mundane moments nor evil events should be seen as miraculous; miracles are extraordinary occurrences.

We can (and should) believe the Spirit gracefully influences every creature, in every moment, and all creation, all the time. And we can (and should) say the Spirit invites creatures to do what’s beautiful, loving, just, and so forth. God’s invitations take different forms for different creatures, and they will vary depending on the circumstances. But saying the Spirit is necessarily present to and influencing all creation doesn’t require us to say that everything occurring is miraculous.

Much of the time, God’s influence goes unnoticed or is ignored. This isn’t surprising, given that the invisible, universal, and incorporeal Spirit isn’t perceptible to our five senses. But sometimes extraordinary events draw our attention to the divine. Some people of faith call them “God moments.” But it’s not divine influence alone that makes an event miraculous, as I’ll explain shortly. The work of the Spirit is part of the reason some moments are extraordinary.

Miracles are Good

Miracles aren’t just extraordinary—they’re also good. We sometimes witness unusual events that are awful, horrific, or destructive. I’ve said evil events, no matter how extraordinary, shouldn’t be considered miracles. The slaughter of a village or people group may be extraordinary, but it’s not miraculous. Genocides are—thankfully—unusual, but we shouldn’t call them “miracles.”

A few theologians define miracles with language that suggest they’re good and extraordinary.[29] Theologian of the Spirit Amos Yong, for instance, defines miracles as “extraordinary manifestations of the Spirit, events in which God’s presence becomes available, tangible, and transformative beyond conventional explanation.”[30] Mildred Bangs Wynkoop says “miracles are personal acts of God’s self-revealing love, events in which God’s presence breaks through human experience in ways that cannot be accounted for by ordinary explanation.”[31]

Neither Yong nor Wynkoop go far enough, however. Neither really clarifies the roles God and creation play in the miraculous. Consequently, their definitions are susceptible to the criticisms I’ve mentioned, namely that the deity they describe does miracles selectively, could prevent evil, suspends natural causes, or can determine outcomes singlehandedly. An adequate definition of miracles should include language that portrays the universal Spirit working with creatures and creation in uncontrolling ways.

Miracles Involve Divine and Creaturely Causation

The final phrase of my definition of a miracle says both the Spirit and creatures/creation play a causal role in the miraculous. Miracles are never the work of God alone; deity never intervenes or invades; the Spirit never controls creatures or creation. God can’t control, because the universal Spirit’s love—even when enacting miracles—is always uncontrolling.

Creatures and creation co-operate with God in diverse ways. But, as I explained earlier, we can divide existence roughly into animate and inanimate.[32] Animate creatures—from cells to squid to sailors—use their agency variously when cooperating with deity in miraculous moments. Inanimate objects in creation don’t have agency in the same way. But miracles can happen when large or small aggregate in creation are aligned with, or become conducive to, the miraculous events the Spirit desires.

Generally speaking, what I’ll call “agent miracles” involve animate creatures cooperating with the Spirit—from the smallest to the largest, from the tiniest to the grandest. Agent miracles include healings, personal transformations, and the like.

The second type are typical of what many call “nature miracles.” They occur when inanimate creation becomes conducive to God’s working to enact extraordinary and good events. Examples include parting the Red Sea.

The designations “agent miracles” and “nature miracles” are not hard and fast, of course, since all creatures and all created entities are part of nature. We’re all natural. And even inanimate objects are composed of disorganized micro-agents, as I explained in earlier chapters.

My Definition Works Well

My definition easily explains the most common miracles. In those, we see the changed lives of people who shift from living a way of life oriented toward destruction and ill-being to one being oriented toward flourishing and well-being. That’s the miracle of salvation, as typically understood. These miracles include synergistic creaturely cooperation with the Spirit.

My definition aligns well with healings too, probably the second most common type of miracles. These extraordinary and good events involve cells, muscles, organs, smaller organisms, and so forth, entities that have a measure of agency to respond. These entities and organisms are influenced by the Spirit and other agents in their environments. The material-mental monism framework I introduced in earlier chapters helps explain how this influence works, because it posits that even the smallest entities have agency and are related to others and God.

Nature miracles are the rarest, but we can explain them too. They occur when the inanimate conditions and/or aggregates of creation are conducive to the Spirit’s working for what is extraordinary and good. Nature miracles are rare because the smallest entities and inanimate objects have the least flexibility and, therefore, are the most inclined toward law-like regularity.[33] The greater the complexity and agency in creatures, the greater the possibility of miracles.

Miracles always involve both divine and creaturely causes.

What About . . . ?

What about Miracles in the Bible?

My definition of miracles fits the biblical witness well. Most scriptural reports of miracles explicitly mention creaturely factors, actors, and forces. No biblical passages say creatures or forces in creation made absolutely no contribution to miraculous outcomes. No scripture verse says God brought about a miraculous outcome by solitary fiat.[34]

Despite our radically different systematic theologies, Reformed theologian Wayne Grudem agrees with my claim that scripture points to creaturely factors and actors in miracles. If miracles are “God working without means,” says Grudem, this “leaves us with very few if any miracles in the Bible, for it is hard to think of a miracle that came about with no means at all.” He specifically identifies healing as involving both God and creation. “Some of the physical properties of the sick person’s body were doubtless involved as part of the healing,” he says. He sees even nature miracles as involving creaturely causation. “When Jesus multiplied the loaves and fish,” says Grudem, “he at least used the original five loaves and two fishes that were there. When he changed water to wine, he used water and made it become wine.”[35]

My theology differs from Grudem’s in many other ways, however, including when he says God does “100% of the work” in miracles, but creatures also “do 100%.” As I said in earlier discussions, I find this view nonsensical, besides being bad math. (See my discussion of divine power in earlier chapters.)

We can make better sense of miracles if we understand them to involve both creaturely and divine action, but with neither doing 100% of the work.[36] Saying both the Spirit and creatures contribute to miraculous events, as I do, overcomes the problems I identified with traditional and non-traditional views.

My view doesn’t require one to think every miracle story true. I doubt every miracle mentioned in the Bible or allegedly occurring today actually happened. Some authors likely told a story to make a theological point or inspire hearers. Some biblical miracles are teaching moments, not historical happenings. And some alleged miracles in the past and today arise from misunderstandings, myths, or fabrications.

We can admit all of this without dismissing miracles outright. But insofar as some events are authentic, extraordinary, and good, we rightly call them miracles, because the Spirit and creation collaborated.

What About Special Divine Causation?

In earlier discussions of divine causation, I rejected the claim that God ever controls anyone or anything. I also rejected the idea that the Spirit sometimes works a little harder than at other times. I said instead God always does all God can do in every situation, influencing at full capacity. The universal Spirit in whose nature love comes first will always love and never control.

Those beliefs about uncontrolling love apply to God’s work in miracles, but I also believe the Spirit’s action varies moment to moment.[37] Although God constantly loves, the ways that deity loves vary depending on the situations and the possibilities. The fact that God loves never varies, but how deity loves varies occasion to occasion. That’s variable divine action.

Extraordinary and good events occur because God worked with what was possible in each situation, empowering and inspiring creatures to do what promotes overall well-being. Although God never sometimes “tries harder,” the possibilities for each situation vary, which means the Spirit’s calls for the best vary. The responses of creatures and the conditions of creation also vary. Something unexpected, atypical, or unusual can occur because the Spirit called creatures to embrace new opportunities for something beautiful, excellent, or valuable.

Because the Spirit knows the past fully and knows all possibilities in the present, God knows which options are most likely to promote overall well-being. Creatures have limited knowledge. This view fits well the words of the writer of the book of Ephesians: “To him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine . . .” (3:20). The “him” to which the author refers is God, but note the passage doesn’t say deity does everything. God does more than we imagine, but we can still assume creatures cooperate. This “far more” includes miracles, as I have defined them.

In one sense, divine action varies, because creatures, situations, and possibilities vary. But God always exerts the most loving influence possible.

What About Blaming the Victim?

Scripture often explicitly mentions creaturely contributions to miracles. After miracles occurred, Jesus sometimes makes statements like, “Your faith has saved and healed you” (Mk. 10:52), “You are now well because of your faith” (Mk. 5:34), or “your faith has made you well” (Lk. 17:19). The cooperative aspect necessary for miracles also comes to the fore when Jesus can’t do miracles, such as happens in his hometown failures, “because of their lack of faith” (Mt. 13:58).

Although these passages and others clearly support the necessary role of creatures in miracles, they’ve unfortunately been used to clobber those who’ve not experienced healing. Saying “you didn’t have enough faith” heaps condemnation on the heads of many who suffer. Instead of offering hope, this phrase and others like it blame victims. Many assume that those who suffer lack faith.[38]

Those who blame victims make a mistake relational metaphysics can fix. Accusers forget that we’re relational people in a relational universe, and we don’t control our bodies or others. And we’re always affected by other actors and factors. We can’t control other creatures, our environments, or our bodies, when “control” means determining them as a sufficient cause.

People wanting miraculous healing may in fact cooperate with the Spirit as best they know how. They may trust God’s love with full faith. And yet other factors, actors, and forces may oppose the healing both they and the Spirit want. Cells and organisms in our bodies—and agents and forces outside them—may not cooperate with God’s healing initiatives. And because the uncontrolling Spirit of love can’t control any, healing doesn’t occur in these cases. We can’t know all the factors at play, so we shouldn’t be quick to judge.

Rather than blaming victims, therefore, my definition of miracles points consistently to an amipotent Spirit who wants everyone healed. But miracles require creaturely cooperation or conducive conditions in creation. We should blame neither the cooperating victim nor God when miraculous healing doesn’t occur, or when things don’t align sufficiently.

For these reasons, we wisely acknowledge the possibility of the miraculous, while also using traditional medical options and promising nontraditional ones. We can wisely treat our bodies and environments in ways that increase the overall chances of health and wholeness. In a relational world of multiple actors and forces, shaming and blaming victims have no place when love is the aim.[39]

Conceptual Confidence

I began this discussion on miracles by noting that some people seem more disposed to witness miracles than others. And I noted that interpretations vary. Skeptics often dismiss claims about miracles, especially when those claims lack verification by recognized authorities. And yet numerous people seem to witness miracles, even some who previously doubted.

My definition of miracles provides conceptual confidence for acknowledging the reality of the miraculous. If miracles occur but we don’t have to interpret them as God intervening, suspending the laws of nature, or controlling, the best arguments against miracles lose their force. And this means that even those most skeptical of miracles might decide they can accept some as authentic because those are good and extraordinary events that involve both divine and creaturely causation.

A good definition gives confidence to believing in miracles.

Conclusion

All of these arguments make sense in light of God’s uncontrolling love — amipotence — and the diverse experiences of life. For more on the overall theology undergirding this perspective, see A Systematic Theology of Love.

^[1] Tom Rundel addresses the problems omnipotence creates for abuse of leadership. See “Omnipotence Justifies Leadership Abuse,” in Amipotence, vol. 2, Brandon Brown, et. al., eds. (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage, 2025).

^[2] Candy Gunther Brown explores this issue documenting healing in Testing Prayer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), ch. 3. See also Joshua W. Brown, Proving a Miracle (San Francisco: Harper, 2026).

^[3]Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 1, Prima Pars, Q.105, Art.7, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947).

^[4]Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 1–5, vol. 1 of Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1958), 60.

^[5]Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1872), 619.

^[6] Adam Clarke, The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments, with a Commentary and Critical Notes, vol. 5 (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, n.d.), 366.

^[7] Cheryl Bridges Johns, Pentecostal Formation: A Pedagogy Among the Oppressed (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic, 1993), 87.

^[8]Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler, Theological Dictionary, trans. Richard Strachan (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965), s.v. “Miracle.”

^[9]Gordon D. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 709.

^[10]Although I’m often critical of Wayne Grudem, his view of miracles is better than most theologians. He says, “a miracle is a less common kind of God’s activity in which he arouses people’s awe and wonder and bears witness to himself.” I’d want to add an explicit claim about creaturely contributions to miracles, but at least Grudem doesn’t speak of interruptions, interventions, or the supernatural. See Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994), 355.

^[11]David and Randall Basinger explore this in Philosophy and Miracle (Lewiston, NY, and Queenston, Ontario: Edwin Mellen, 1986).

^[12]See examples of this in Gal. 4:13-14; Phil. 2:27; 1 Tim. 5:23; 2 Tim. 4:20.

^[13]Stephen Bradford Long, “Why I am Not A Christian: The Problem of Miracles,” (https://stephenbradfordlong.com/2023/08/23/why-i-am-not-a-christian-the-problem-of-miracles/ accessed 12/5/2025)

^[14]Christine Overall, “Miracles and Larmer,” Dialogue 42 (2003): 131.

^[15]One of the better arguments against the notion that miracles require divine coercion is found in David Ray Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000). See also Chad Bahl, The Death of Supernaturalism (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage, 2025).

^[16] Maurice Wiles, God’s Action in the World (London: SCM, 1986), 29. Andrew Hronich addresses the question by responding to my proposals and others in “The Problem of Selective Miracles,” Eleutheria: John W. Rawlings School of Divinity Academic Journal 9:1 (2025): 57–74.

^[17]Adam Clarke, The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments, with a Commentary and Critical Notes, vol. 5 (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, n.d.), 366.

^[18]See David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” in On Human Nature and the Understanding, Antony Flew, ed. (New York: Collier, 1962 [1748]).

^[19]Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 1, Prima Pars, Q.105, Art.7, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947).

^[20]Amos Yong identifies the problems that come from thinking miracles amount to violations of the laws of nature in The Spirit of Creation: Modern Science and Divine Action in the Pentecostal-Charismatic Imagination (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), ch. 4.

^[21]Howard Van Till addresses this issue by affirming what he calls the “functional integrity” of creation. See “Basil, Augustine, and the Doctrine of Creation’s Functional Integrity,” Science and Christian Belief, 8:1 (1996): 21-38.

^[22]Albert Einstein, quoted in Alice Calaprice, ed., The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 474.

^[23]Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 282.

^[24]Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 37-38.

^[25]Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), 88.

^[26]Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Christian Experience in the Modern World (New York: Crossroad, 1980), 220.

^[27]Some use the word “occasionalism” for this view, which denies the category of the natural altogether. It says what we consider natural causation is really God producing outcomes without any creaturely contributions. For an advocate of this position, see G. C. Berkouwer, The Providence of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1952).

^[28]This is a main argument in Craig S. Keener’s two volume work, Miracles: The Credibility of The New Testament Accounts, vols. 1 & 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2011). See also Paul Alexander, Signs and Wonders (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009); Candy Gunther Brown, Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Harold Koenig, The Healing Power of Faith (New York: Touchstone, 1999).

^[29] For one of the better concise attempts to define miracles, see David Basinger, “What is a Miracle?” in The Cambridge Companion to Miracles, Graham H. Twelftree, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

^[30]Amos Yong, Renewing Christian Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014), 228.

^[31]Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, A Theology of Love (Kansas City, MO: Beacon Hill Press, 1972), 216.

^[32]Some entities have both animate and inanimate dimensions. For instance, many plants have aspects with agency (leaves) but other aspects that are aggregates (inner trunk). Human cyborgs (like me) can have organismic entities and aggregates. For instance, I have inanimate medical devices in my chest and plates in my legs, but most of my body is comprised of animated organisms. I explain these issues in “Love, Society, and Machines,” in Love, Technology, and Theology, Scott A. Midson, ed. (London: T & T Clark, 2020).

^[33]I have addressed the implications of this definition of the miraculous in other books. See, for instance, Thomas Jay Oord, The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015), ch. 8; Thomas Jay Oord, Questions and Answers for God Can’t (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage, 2021), ch. 2.

^[34]In The God of Miracles, John Collins admits that biblical writers regard creation as endowed with natural properties and causal powers. He argues that special divine action “goes beyond the natural causal powers of the parties involved” (87). But all of the biblical passages he cites don’t require us to think that this power “beyond” natural causes is God determining outcomes unilaterally. See C. John Collins, The God of Miracles (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2000).

^[35]Grudem, Systematic Theology, 355-56.

^[36]On this issue in Mark’s gospel, see Russ Dean, “Amipotence in the Gospel of Mark,” in Amipotence, vol. 1, Chris S. Baker, et. al. eds. (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage, 2025).

^[37] Andre Rabe questions the meaning of “special” divine action in miracles. See “The Miraculous Nature of Our World,” in Amipotence, vol. 2, Brandon Brown, et. al., eds. (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage, 2025).

^[38] Joshua Reichard appeals to the logic of amipotence to avoid blaming victims. See “A Call for an Amipotent Pentecostal-Charismatic Renewal,” in Amipotence, vol. 2, Brandon Brown, et. al., eds. (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage, 2025).

^[39] I address blaming the victim, miracles, and healing in greater depth in God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love After Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage, 2019), ch. 3.

The post A Realistic Theory of Miracles appeared first on For The Love of Wisdom and The Wisdom of Love.

I’m thrilled to announce the publication of my newest writing. This is the first book ever written with the title, A Systematic Theology of Love.

I say this after scouring libraries and databases looking for books with this title. I found none. Perhaps a book with this title was written long ago or went unpublished. But to my knowledge, this is the first book called A Systematic Theology of Love.

Why?

One might think those who believe God is supremely loving and who also value conceptual consistency would have written many books with this title. The bald claim, “God is love,” is found in Christian scriptures, after all, and both Hebrew-language and Greek-language portions of scripture champion divine love.

Theists in Islam, Judaism, and other religious traditions also champion love and say God loves creation. And yet, to my knowledge, no one in those traditions has written a book called A Systematic Theology of Love.

In the first chapter of this book, I address this “Why?” question. I also define love and explain the open and relational theology undergirding this work.

Unusual Theology

This is the first of a three-volume systematic theology. As the subtitle indicates, I address in this book the doctrine of God proper, including the usual issues theologians ponder. But the responses I give to those issues differ from traditional fare. In some cases, those differences are radical!

The majority of this book addresses the details of what it might mean to believe in a loving, universal Spirit whom most of us call “God.” I address issues like God’s nature, what it means to be a spirit, divine knowledge, God’s relation to time, divine incorporeality, what it means to say God loves, whether God is personal, divine becoming, God’s relationality, and so much more.

An entire chapter is devoted to explaining why theists should stop saying God is omnipotent. But another chapter is devoted to a replacement view of divine power: amipotence. These chapters are my most developed writings on God’s power.

God and Creation

In the second part of this book, I address God as creator. I reject the creation from nothing theory and offer an alternative that I think better fits scripture, reason, science, and experience. That alternative says God is “the Ever Creator.”

I also wade through a host of issues pertaining to providence. Those issues include miracles, creaturely free will, the problem of good, emergence, agency among smaller entities, divine-creaturely collaboration, material-mental monism, and God’s will. In one chapter, I explore the problem of evil and solve it.

Formats

This book is now available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook. The audiobook is so long I divided it, calling the second audiobook, “The Ever Creator and Amipotent Providence.” That second audiobook covers chapters 11-15.

As usual, I’m working with a host of online book distributors. In addition to Amazon, look for the book at your favorite outlet.

I’m excited to offer this new book, A Systematic Theology of Love! And I look forward to hearing responses from readers. For the Amazon link to the book, click here.

The post A Systematic Theology of Love! appeared first on For The Love of Wisdom and The Wisdom of Love.

The first of the two volumes is titled Amipotence: Support and Criticism. The second is Amipotence: Expansion and Application. Essayists responded to my book, The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence, but I have explained amipotence in other books too.

I invented the word “amipotence” to replace omnipotence. By it, I mean the power of God’s uncontrolling love. The idea is that God always loves everyone and everything, and because divine love never controls, God can’t control anyone or anything.

“Ami” means “love” in Latin, and “potence” means “power” or “influence.” The word is pronounced “am” (like “amity”), with a short “i” (like “it”), and “potence” (like “moments”).

The essays in these two books are simply outstanding! I strongly recommend that you get copies of one or both. The subject matter of the essays ranges widely, and I learned a great deal reading them.

As the books’ subtitles suggest, essays add, expand, and/or apply the idea of amipotence. But about 20% of the essayists wrote criticisms of the idea or its implications. There’s no bad essay in either book!

I spent 2025 responding to each essay, and my responses are now posted online. Most of my responses are drabbles, which are statements exactly 100 words long. But on a few essays, I wrote longer responses. Click the links on the essay titles below to see them; you’ll also see suggestions for further reading.

I cite a number of the amipotence essays in my forthcoming book, A Systematic Theology of Love: God and Creation, volume one. I’m sure I’ll cite more of essays in later volumes in the systematic theology.

I thank the executive editor, Brandon Brown especially for administrating both volumes. And I thank book editors Chris Baker, Steve Fountain, Fran Stedman, Melissa Owens Stewart, Deanna Young, and Travis Young. They were all fantastic! I also offer a huge word of appreciation to Chris Baker for posting every essay on the Center for Open and Relational Theology website (c4ort.com). That’s a lot of work!

Below are the essays in the two books in (roughly) alphabetical order. Each has a hyperlink that takes those who click to the essay online. If you notice an essay that should be included, send me a note about it.

Thanks again to every essayist for helping me explore amipotence!

AMIPOTENCE ESSAYS

“Amipotence with Added Anarchy” by Graham Adams

“I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” by Monica Alhbin

“The Ontological Idolatry of Love” by Jason Alvis

“An Empowering Not Overpowering Spirit” by Dave Andrews

“Man, Bear, or Amipotent God?” by Janel Apps Ramsey

“Hell and Amipotence” by David Anzalone

“Amipotence Confined” by Charles Atkins

“Night of the Living Words” by Charles Bakker

“The Panarchist Politics of Amipotence” by Matthew Baker

“A Womanist Liberative Response to Amipotence” by Karen Baker-Fletcher

“Amipotence as a Solution to the Problem of Divine Hiddenness” by Chad Bahl

“Practicing Amipotence” by Chris Baker

“Is an Amipotent God Preferable to Freewill Theism?” by David Basinger

“Trinity, Time, and an Unfolding Future” by Allan R. Bevere

“Even God Can’t Have It All” by Donna Bowman

“Silent, Still and Sweet Attraction” by Michael Brierley

“The Prevenience of Amipotence” by Brandon Brown

“Why Can’t God Do More” by John H. Buchanan

“Love: The Name of the Universe” by T.D. Burnette

“Love Without Qualification” by Anna-Case-Winters

“God and Kidney Stones” by Clifford Chalmers Cain

“Amipotence: The Ghost Buster of Harmful Doctrines” by Michael Camp

“The Measureless Game” by Jason Clark

“The Power of Love” by Kelly James Clark

“Amipotence Vs. Omnipotence” by John B. Cobb, Jr.

“Omnipotence, Amipotence, or Just the Steadfast Love of God?” by Robert D. Cornwall

“The Explanatory Failure of Amipotence” by Robin A. Collins

“The Palindrome of ‘Bolton’ Would Be ‘Notlob!’“ by Simon Cross

“Stolen Sovereignty: Abuse and the Denial of Agency” by Nathan Croy

“Amipotence Overcomes Two Problems with Omnipotence” by John E. Culp

“Your Church is Dying” by Ulrick Refsager Dam

“The Parable of Amipotent Love” by Paul Dazet

“Amipotence in the Gospel of Mark” by Russ Dean

“The Universe of God’s Dynamic Love” by Ilia Delio

“Drive-By Baskets of Christmas Cheer” by Teri Ditslear

“Who’s in Charge?” by Martha Elias Downey

“Perfect Passivity” by Daniel A. Dombrowski

“From Amipotence to All-Encompassing Mercy” by Adis Duderija

“God Can’t Be All-Powerful and All-Loving!” by Mike Edwards

“The Politics of Amipotence” by Bruce G. Epperly

“If Love is Power, ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’“ by David Fitch

“The Interwoven Fabric of Christian Faith” by David Fergusson

“The Supremacist Soteriology of Divine Omnipotence” by Alex Forrester

“The Still Birth of Amipotence” by Gabriel Gordon

“Theology, Pediatrics, and Everyday Life” by Chris Hanson

“Amipotence in the Wesleyan Tradition” by Steve Harper

“Amipotence Versus the Psalms” by William Hasker

“All Loving Death Practices” by Beth Hayward

“Power, Control, and our Failure to Love the Earth” by Aimee Allison Hein

“Amipotence and Animal Rights” by E.A. Drew Hensley

“Amipotence and the Hope of Redemption” by Wm. Curtis Holtzen

“Justice Seeking Amipotence” by Nancy R. Howell

“God Doesn’t Barge In” by Sarah K. Howley

“The God in the Burning Bush Is Not Omnipotent” by Matt Huffman

“The Force and Form of Love and God’s Cosmic Body” by Darren Iammarino

“The Power of Abiding Love That Will Not Let Us Go” by Charissa Jaeger-Sanders

“God Isn’t Waiting for Your Cry for Help” by Jeremy Jernigan

“If Not for the Grace of Nature, There Go I” by Mark Gregory Karris

“Suffering and the Amipotent God” by Catherine Keller

“Neuro-Relational Spirituality and Religious Power Games” by Shaleen Kendrick

“Amipotence and the Nature of Agency“ by Simon Kittle

“Why It Matters that Love is First” by Sarah Heaner Lancaster

“What’s Love Got to Do With It?” by Anson Laytner

“Is the Amipotent God the World-Soul?” by Joanna Leidenhag

“An Apology for Qualified Omnipotence” by Christopher Lilley

“We Must Rethink the Cross“ by Jason Liesendahl

“God’s Power and the Therapy Room” by Steven A. Luff

“How Are We Influenced by God’s Love?” by Brian Claude Macallan

“An Open and Relational Eschatology” by Lon Marshall

“Only by Love Unfeigned” by Patrick Q. Mason

“Amipotence Versus Amorepotence, Oord Versus McCall” by Bradford McCall

“Practicing the Presence of Amipotence” by Jay McDaniel

“The Meaning of God is to Love and Be Loved” by James McLachlan

“The Loving God Incapable of Love” by Ryan Patrick McLaughlin

“Jewish Insights on God’s Power and Love” by John C. Merkle

“Did the Spiritual but Not Religious Leave Because of Omnipotence?” by Linda Mercadante

“If God Learned to Love, Then God Can Teach Us How” by Tim Miller

“No Quick Fix” by Shannon Davy Mimbs

“Divine Cancer and Amipotent Community” by Ryan Miller

“S/He Who Cares About Every Tear!” by Saida Mirsadri

“Islamic Process Panentheism Offers a Deeper Perspective on Divine Action” by Jared Morningstar

“Amipo-verdant: Love is Green” by Craig Morton

“Omnipotence Has No Qualifications” by R.T. Mullins

“Like God” by Eleanor O’Donnell

“Sourdough Focaccia: A Case Study of Love” by Tori E. Owens

“Amipotence in Hindu Monotheism” by Swami Padmanabha

“Love is Greater than an Omnipotent ‘God’“ by Sheri Pallas

“Amipotence (Perhaps)” by Joshua G. Patterson

“Minimalist Creation ex Nihilo and the God Who is Surprised” by Joe Pettit

“Hope in Love” by Elizabeth Enns Petters

“Do Our Bacteria Love Us?” by John F. Pohl

“The Decline of Omnipotence in Pop Culture” by Nick Polk

“Must Omnipotence Die So that Amipotence May Live?” by Austin Pounds

“Amipotentiality and the Sacrament of Service” by B. Keith Putt

“A Divine Marriage” by Sharon L. Baker Putt

“The Miraculous Nature of Our World” by Andre Rabe

“Living Out Amipotence” by Vikki Randall

“Who is God to Me?” by Mike Rans

“Divine Malpraxis” by Elijah Razo

“Resisting the Authoritarian Lure” by Marcel Redling

“A Call for an Amipotent Pentecostal-Charismatic Revival” by Joshua D. Reichard

“Exaggerated Rumors of Omnipotence’s Death” by Alan R. Rhoda

“A Beautiful Hope“ by Michael M. Rose

“Omnipotence Justifies Leadership Abuse” by Tom Rundel

“Can Empowering Love Heal Trauma?” by Helene Russell

“The Determined Divine” by Niq Ruud

“Tovarche: Amipotence’s Doctrinal Domino Effect” by Shawn M. Ryan

“A Threefold Critique of Amipotence” by Manuel Schmid

“Four Fatal Flaws of Amipotence” by Wm. Andrew Schwartz

“A Theology Without an Expiration Date” by Josh Scott

“God Can’t Because God Cares” by Eric Sentell

“Amplifying Amipotence Through a Theopoetic Re-Reading of Creation” by Matthew David Segall

“The Risk of Love and its Existential Response to the Possibility of Self-Death” by Farhan Shah

“An Amipotent God is a Mad God” by Rose Sharon

“Smite Our Enemies, Loving God?” by Pete Shaw

“Logic, Definitions, and Why We Should Look Elsewhere” by J. Aaron Simmons

“The Foundational Love of God and Spiritual Direction” by Shelly A. Skinner

“Seventy Times Seventy Times Infinity” by Jeanyne B. Slettom

“The Metaphysics of Love” by Olav Bryant Smith

“From Power to Love: Reframing God Beyond the Childish Ego“ by Joe Smith

“Good Lord Willing” by Melissa Owens Stewart

“Conducting the Power of the Past” by John M. Sweeney

“An Amipotent God is Both the Poet and the Poetry” by Bill Tammeus

“Good Riddance, Omnipotence” by Libby Tedder Hugus

“Harm Reduction as an Exercise of Amipotence” by Brad Thibodeaux

“Amipotence and Atonement” by Nichole Torbitzky

“Love Encounters of the Fifth Kind” by Ian Todd

“A Preacher Kid’s Tale of Amipotence” by Johan Tredoux

“Is God a Hypocrite?” by Jason Tripp

“Where is God…?“ by Tracy L. Tucker

“Amipotence for Everyday Life” by Mark Umstot

“I Believe in God the Father Almighty” by Gijsbert van den Brink

“Catching Up with Charles Hartshorne” by Donald Wayne Viney

“Faith in a God that Does Not Kill” by Steve Watson

“A Middle Way Between Theodicy and Antitheodicy” by Mark Waters

“God’s Powerful Love Is in Us, Too“ by Jeff Wells

“Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! Divine Omniscience (Also) Has to Go!” by Clarence Graham White

“Amipotence and Sanctification“ by Angela Wilson

“The All-Nurturing, All-Sustaining God of Scripture” by Karen Strand Winslow

“Covenant Theology, Lament, & Amipotence” by William Yarchin

“What the World Needs Now… Amipotence” by Deanna M. Young

“It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” by James Travis Young

The post Responding to 150+ Amipotence Essays appeared first on For The Love of Wisdom and The Wisdom of Love.

I’ve written about the problem of evil in many books, but I chose a different approach to the topic for this one. I decided to look carefully at two influential New Testament scholars and their exploration of scripture and the problem.

Below are summaries and analyses of books by Bart Ehrman and NT Wright. Their reflections on scripture set me up to propose a six-fold solution to the problem of evil. You can find that solution on my Substack and in the forthcoming book.

Evil and Scripture – Bart Ehrman

Christians search scripture for a solution to the problem of evil. In a book he titles, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer, biblical scholar Bart Ehrman explores what biblical writers say about God and suffering.^[17] The Bible offers a range of answers.^[18]

Many biblical authors believe pain and suffering are divine punishment. The book of Amos, for instance, describes God punishing humans for their transgressions. This includes burning, nakedness, famine, isolation, drought, pestilence, death, and other disasters (1:3-4, 6-8). It’s brutal! But divine punishment is not just found in Amos. It’s “the point of view of the majority of authors who produced the biblical texts,” concludes Ehrman.^[19]

If an omnipotent deity punishes the wicked, people who suffer more than others must be more wicked. But this doesn’t fit life as we know it nor the witness of other biblical texts, such as the story of Job. Innocent babies sometimes suffer, and the wicked sometimes prosper. More importantly, the idea that evil is God’s punishment stands at odds with divine forgiveness. If true, God doesn’t always “turn the other cheek,” even though Jesus tells his disciples they must (Mt. 5:39). Therefore, the punishment view of evil portrays God as not always forgiving.

A second biblical view says suffering is the natural consequence that comes from sin, ours or the sins of others. The book of Judges, for instance, offers examples of victims who suffer because of the violence others do. The apostle Paul recounts suffering caused by humans and other creaturely factors, not God (2 Cor. 11:23-26). And New Testament writers say a sinless Jesus suffered and died at the hands of religious and political authorities.

The idea that sin brings natural negative consequences is the closest biblical writers come to free-will theodicy. But believers who embrace it, says Ehrman, usually believe in an “all-powerful Sovereign of this world who foreknows all things.” If an omnipotent and foreknowing deity causes or allows evil, says Ehrman, “there is very little we could do about it.^[20]” It must be God’s will.

A third biblical response says evil is redemptive: God wants it for some good. The story of Joseph is thought to illustrate this (Gen. chs. 37-50), says Ehrman. Joseph was sold into slavery, but this evil made it possible for him, later, to save his brothers. The story of Moses leading people out of Egypt can be interpreted as God allowing evil (slavery) for some greater good (the promised land). Many say God wanted the death of Jesus, because “by his wounds we are healed” (Isa. 53:5). The idea that suffering is redemptive, says Ehrman, “is found throughout the Bible.^[21]”

This answer fails to account for the fact that genuine evils lead to less good than what was otherwise possible. Take genocide as an example, or rape. Whatever goods that come from them are surely less beneficial than if these horrors had never occurred. If they aren’t, we should rejoice when mass killings and sexual abuse occur. But we don’t. In fact, “most suffering is not positive,” claims Ehrman. It “does not have a silver lining, is not good for the body or soul, and leads to wretched and miserable, not positive, outcomes.^[22]”

Ehrman labels the final biblical answer to evil “apocalypticism.^[23]” It says evil forces work against God and harm creatures. Those who embrace the apocalyptic view, says Ehrman, believe “God handed over control of the world to these forces of evil.” Those forces will eventually be overcome, however, when the kingdom of God has come in power (Mk 9:1). According to this view, says Ehrman, “God will reassert himself and wrest control of this world from the forces that now dominate it.^[24]”

The apocalyptic answer is rife with problems, because most who hold this view think God is omnipotent. To overcome evil, an all-powerful deity doesn’t need to wait on anyone or anything; He can do it now. Besides, a perfectly loving deity would never give control to evil forces and figures. That’s like hiring a babysitter whom we know tortures children. And thinking God will eventually overcome evil singlehandedly should, logically, lead us to be complacent about solving life’s problems. Why make sacrifices now if, no matter what we do, God will later fix things singlehandedly?

After considering the Bible’s answers to the problem of evil, Ehrman finds none satisfying. Like atheists and agnostics, therefore, Ehrman stopped believing God exists. He “felt compelled to leave Christianity,” he says, although he left “kicking and screaming, wanting desperately to hold to the faith.^[25]” He “could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given… a cesspool of misery and suffering.^[26]”

The Bible does not solve the problem that leads hundreds of millions to unbelief and billions to confusion.

Evil and Scripture – N. T. Wright

In his book Evil and the Justice of God, N. T. Wright also explores what scripture says about God and evil. Wright doesn’t address as many biblical passages as Ehrman does. But Wright’s exploration leads him to agree with Ehrman on some points and disagree on others.

Wright explicitly tells readers he doesn’t have an answer to why God fails to prevent evil. And like Ehrman, he believes biblical writers don’t solve the problem, let alone reveal evil’s origin. “We are not told — or not in any way that satisfies our puzzled questioning,” says Wright, “how and why there is radical evil within God’s wonderful, beautiful, and essentially good creation.^[27]”

Several of Wright’s comments address well-known responses to the problem of evil, however. He’s skeptical of the view that God permits evil so that virtue can flourish, for instance.^[28] Wright never says God allows evil to bring a greater good.^[29] He sometimes talks about God’s “project” for creation and, in several comments, says sin is self-defeating.^[30]

Wright never directly says, as I do, that God can’t prevent evil singlehandedly. But he makes statements that say or imply divine power has limits. He says, for instance, that “God cannot undo the good creation, even though it has gone wrong.^[31]” That’s a ‘God can’t’ statement. Wright says God’s work to overcome evil isn’t easy. “God has had to work to bring the world out of the mess,” he says. Deity “has to get his boots muddy” and “his hands bloody.^[32]” That suggests limits on divine power.

Importantly, Wright rejects the idea that “God is the omnicompetent managing director of a very large machine.^[33]” That statement seems to admit God can’t do some things. But Wright says that for a reason he cannot understand, “the Creator God will not simply abolish evil from this world.^[34]” The words “will not” suggest that God could abolish evil but chooses not to do so.

Wright’s main proposal for understanding God and evil includes a central role for the crucifixion of Jesus. The cross is “an event in which the living God deals with [evil].”^[35] It is “confronted,” “defeated,” and “exhausted,” says Wright.^[36] The cross is “the sign that pagan empire, symbolized in the might and power of sheer brutal force, has been decisively challenged by a different power, the power of love, the power that shall win the day.^[37]” In other quotes like this last one, Wright prioritizes love over power.

God does not defeat evil by the cross alone, however, according to Wright. We also have a role to play. We “act as God’s wise agents…to bring his wise and healing order to the world, putting the world to rights under his just and gentle rule.^[38]” We must “implement the victory of God in the world through suffering love.^[39]”

How will God do this? Wright doesn’t provide specific details. But he points to forgiveness. Overcoming evil and bringing new creation involves God’s forgiving love. We must also forgive so that we “will no longer be affected or infected by [evil].^[40]” This sentence summarizes Wright’s view: “When we understand forgiveness, flowing from the work of Jesus and the Spirit, as the strange, powerful thing it really is, we begin to realize that God’s forgiveness of us, and our forgiveness of others, is the knife that cuts the rope by which sin, anger, fear, recrimination and death are still attached to us.^[41]”

So… how should we evaluate Wright’s proposals?

Because Wright does not solve the problem of evil, the book is, on that central issue, a failure. Readers are left with their main question unanswered: Why doesn’t God prevent genuine evil? And because the question remains, others arise. If God has the ability to abolish evil eventually, wouldn’t a loving deity do so now? Why wait? If God can resurrect Jesus without “undoing” creation, how can God resurrect the rest of us without undoing it? What’s the relation between divine sovereignty and suffering love?

The fact that the Bible fails to solve the problem of evil — something both Wright and Ehrman admit — does not mean the issue is inconsequential. The absence of an explicit answer in scripture doesn’t give us an excuse to pretend the problem doesn’t need solving. It does. But the Bible doesn’t solve it.

Wright’s focus on forgiveness is partly helpful. The Spirit’s forgiveness delivers us from worries about divine punishment. Our forgiving delivers us from resentment, bitterness, and self-loathing. But God’s forgiving and ours doesn’t deliver us from the harm we experience when we and others do evil. Worse, a deity who allows evil just to forgive it does not love victims.

Although a failure in one sense, Wright’s book is helpful in others. He shuns inadequate answers to evil, for instance, and admits that divine power has limits. Wright doesn’t dismiss evil as privation or say God allows suffering for some greater good. He never says God alone overcomes evil and often points to the role creatures play. His emphasis upon forgiveness opposes the idea that God punishes. Most promisingly, Wright rejects divine omnicompetence and brutal force.

According to Wright, God’s power is suffering and gentle love.

Conclusion

Ehrman’s and Wright’s exploration of scripture helps in several ways. Both scholars are clear that scripture cannot solve the biggest question both atheists and theists ask: why doesn’t God prevent genuine evil? The work of these two New Testament scholars should prompt us to look beyond the Bible.

In earlier chapters of my Systematic Theology of Love, I’ve proposed a view of a loving but uncontrolling Spirit and a doctrine of divine power I call “amipotence.” Following my engagement with Ehrman and Wright, I offer a six-fold solution to the problem of evil, because the problem has various dimensions. While my solution is not explicitly found in scripture, it draws from various biblical themes and ideas.

[To read the full chapter, including the six-fold solution to the problem of evil, consider becoming a paid Substack subscriber. Paid subscribers get a signed copy of the finished book and their names added to the book’s acknowledgements. See this link for info.]

The post Ehrman & Wright on the Problem of Evil appeared first on For The Love of Wisdom and The Wisdom of Love.

Panentheism

The intimate connection between the universal Spirit and all creation is sometimes called ‘panentheism.’ Although coined in the 19th century, the label gained attention in the 20th thanks to the process philosopher Charles Hartshorne.^[1] It depicts a model of the God-universe relationship that differs from pantheism and most systematic theologies. In panentheism, ‘pan’ means ‘all,’ ‘en’ means ‘in,’ and ‘theism’ means ‘God.’ All creation is in God.^[2]

At least a dozen versions of panentheism are on offer, and each builds from ontological and theological claims.^[3] At stake in this diversity is the meaning of ‘in’ and various views of God. I do not find helpful versions of panentheism that understand ‘in’ spatially. They imply that all creatures are inside a divine container. In other versions, panentheism is understood as the finite within the infinite. This confuses, because ‘infinite’ is ambiguous at best and a negation of the finite at worst.^[4] In other unhelpful forms of panentheism, the world is said to ‘participate’ in God, with little explanation of what ‘participate’ means.^[5]

When it comes to the meaning of panentheism, confusion reigns.

In the Divine Experience

When I affirm panentheism, I’m embracing at least three ideas. First, panentheism as I understand it says all creatures and all creation are in God’s experience. The universal, becoming Lover experiences creaturely others moment by moment, and all creation affects God. Everything influences the Living One.

Let me illustrate what it means to be in someone’s experience. As you read or hear the words of this book, they enter your experience. They affect you. Although you are distinct from them, they influence your thinking and, therefore, your living. When you feel a change in temperature, your experience also changes, because the temperature affects you. And so on. Analogously, panentheism says every creature — great and small — affects the universal Spirit’s experience. Moment by moment, we all enter God’s experiential life.

I use the word ‘influence’ often when describing panentheism. The word has Latin roots and means ‘to flow into.’ In terms of God’s experience, influence describes the causal and emotional sway of creatures upon the experience of the Loving One. All creatures flow into the divine life.

Directly with and Entangled

The second idea central to panentheism denies that the Spirit is located somewhere outside creation. It rejects the popular idea that God sits upon a throne in the clouds or resides at the edges of the universe.^[6] Panentheism says the universal Spirit entangles with creation, in the sense that creatures directly relate to and affect deity.^[7] God is never “over there” but always “right here.” I call this theo-cosmo-entanglement.

I add to this second point the claim that God has never existed without creaturely others.^[8] The loving Spirit everlastingly and necessarily relates, creates, empowers, inspires, and loves creation. It’s God’s nature to relate with whatever God creates. Therefore, a necessary relationship exists between the universal Spirit and creation, although individual creatures and universes come and go.^[9]

My claim that God necessarily relates with creation is uncommon among systematic theologies.^[10] The Christian scriptures don’t deny this view, but they also don’t explicitly endorse it. It’s a metaphysical claim. But I agree with Terence Fretheim when he says, “God and creation must be considered together, because again and again the [biblical] texts keep them together.”*^[11] When drawing from Jeremiah’s witness, Fretheim puts it simply: “Where there is world, there is God; where there is God, there is world (Jer. 23:24).”^[12] 

This necessary relationship between Creator and creation is affirmed by other voices. “God is always a God for a world,^[13]” says Raimon Panikkar. Teilhard de Chardin puts it this way, “the universe contributes something that is vitally necessary to God.^[14]” Henri Bergson says, “the mystics unanimously bear witness that God needs us, just as we need God.” And he asks rhetorically, “Why should [God] need us unless it is to love us?^[15]” I put it this way: The Spirit is both the Ever Creator and Ever Relator, because creating and relating are necessary aspects of the One whose nature requires loving entanglement with creation.

God and Creation are not Identical

The third key idea to panentheism says God is more than and not identical to creation. Although the Spirit and creation always entangle in intimate mutual influence, deity is not another creature nor the whole of creation. It would make no sense to say, as I do, that the Spirit and creation entangle if the two were identical. ‘Entangle’ requires difference. God transcends the universe by differing from it, but deity is not so radically different as to have no similarities with creatures.^[16] God is numerically distinct from but relationally entwined with the universe.

The analogy of the mind’s relation to the body — if carefully explained — helps make sense of God as entangled with but not identical to creation. For the analogy to work well, we must think of the mind as a series of experiential entities with material and mental dimensions. And we must think the mind directly influences the body (especially brain), and the body directly influences the mind. We cannot see this mutual influence by opening our craniums, of course, but we infer it through our experience.^[17]

Analogously, the divine Spirit is a series of divine moments with material and mental dimensions. The Spirit has direct influence upon every creature, each of which also has material and mental dimensions. All that exists, therefore, directly influences God, and God directly influences all. But God and creation are not identical. And just as we cannot open our craniums to see our minds at work, we also cannot see the invisible Spirit working in the world. But we infer the Spirit’s work by what we observe and directly experience.

Theoenpanism

It’s not simply that all creation is in God’s experience. An account of providence that takes love seriously says God is in every creature’s experience. The Universal Lover affects all others, from micro to macro. This is theoenpanism: God is in all.^[18] The view also supports the long-standing claim that the universal Spirit sustains all creation. God is in us.

Typical accounts of providence portray God’s sustaining activity through external causation. Many theologians assume a transcendent and unaffected deity exerts causal force upon what amounts to the ‘machine’ of creation and its creaturely ‘cogs.’ Divine power so described is not inherently empowering or invitational; it overpowers and imposes. This construes God like a football player tackling another or, as the Heidelberg confession puts it, “a fatherly hand.” But unlike football players and hands, deity is immaterial and invisible. This way of talking often erases any analogy between a primary divine cause and secondary creaturely causes, rendering God’s action inconceivable.

Theoenpanism thinks about God’s presence differently. Without reducing deity to a mere ‘spark’ or ‘energy,’ it says the Spirit indwells all creation. All creatures are always affected by a loving deity, because the Spirit is truly within the experiences of all. Here, again, material-mental monism is at play. Theoenpanism also affirms creaturely union with God, without characterizing that union as complete identification or a loss of creaturely identity. The Spirit is united with creation by being within every creaturely experience, but God is not a creature.

The strong version of theoenpanism says the loving Spirit is necessarily in each creature’s moment-by-moment experiencing. No entity, organism, creature, world, or universe can exist without divine influence. As John’s gospel puts it, without God’s empowering, we can do nothing (Jn. 15:5). But the requirement of divine influence extends to all creatures. The Spirit will never withdraw nor abandon creation, because the Universal Lover necessarily indwells the experiences of creaturely others. God can’t leave us.

In loving providence, panentheism complements theoenpanism, and vice versa.

(For the rest of this essay, see this link to my Substack account.)

^[1] The word ‘panentheism’ was apparently coined by Karl Christian Friedrich Krause. On this and Krause’s particular version of panentheism, see Benedikt Paul Göcke, The Panentheism of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832): From Transcendental Philosophy to Metaphysics (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018). On Hartshorne’s use of the term, see Charles Hartshorne and William L. Reese, Philosophers Speak of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).

^[2] For an articulate explanation of panentheism, see the work of Michael W. Brierley, including “Naming a Quiet Revolution: The Panentheistic Turn in Modern Theology,” in In Whom We Live and Move and Have our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke, eds., (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 1–15.

^[3] For an example of the variety, see Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke, eds., In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004). See also Philip Clayton, “How Radically Can God Be Reconceived before Ceasing to Be God? The Four Faces of Panentheism,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 52, no. 4 (December 2017): 1044–1059. For more on the history of panentheism and its various meanings, see John Culp, “Panentheism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/panentheism/>, (accessed 6/19/2005).

^[4] In several books, Philip Clayton advocates for this form of panentheism. See, for instance,  Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, Divine Action, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008).

^[5] John Cooper’s criticism of panentheism draws from or is predicated upon various theories I also find problematic. Cooper’s helpful criticisms do not apply to the version of panentheism I offer. See John Cooper, Panentheism—The Other God of the Philosophers: From Plato to the Present (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006).

^[6] See Amos Yong, The Spirit of Creation: Modern Science and Divine Action in the Pentecostal-Charismatic Imagination (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2011).

^[7] Kirk Wegter-McNelly offers something similar in The Entangled God: Divine Relationality and Quantum Physics (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011).

^[8] Many versions of panentheism do not say God necessarily and everlastingly relates to creatures. See some of this variety in In Whom We Live and Move and Have our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke, eds.

^[9] Women and Non-White People. Some strongly criticize pantheism by associating it with women and non-white traditions (see Mary Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies). These critics worry that the God of pantheism was intimately related to creatures, lacked independence, and endorsed radical differences in creation rather than uniformity. Panentheism as I conceive it proudly embraces the idea of divine intimacy with creation and creaturely plurality. It affirms that God is not identical with creation but emphasizes a God-universe entanglement.

^[10] My claim is rare among the contributors to the more accessible book on panentheism edited by Andrew Davis and Philip Clayton. See How I Found God in Everyone and Everywhere: An Anthology of Spiritual Memoirs (New York: Monkfish Book Publishing, 2018).

^[11] See God and the World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation (Nashville: Abingdon, 2005), xvi. For more on the meaning of theocosmocentrism, see Thomas Jay Oord and Wm. Andrew Schwartz, “Panentheism and Panexperientialism for Open and Relational Theology,” in Panentheism and Panpsychism: Philosophy of Religion Meets Philosophy of Mind, Godehard Brüntrup, et. al., eds., (Mentis Verlag/Brill, 2020).

^[12] Fretheim, Suffering of God, 37-38.

^[13] Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity, The Gifford Lectures (New York: Orbis, 2013), 207.

^[14] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Christianity and Evolution: Reflections on Science and Religion, René Hague, trans. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1974) 177.

^[15] Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (London: Macmillan & Co., 1935), 255.

^[16] Michael Brierley argues similarly in “The Potential of Panentheism for Dialogue between Science and Religion,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, Phillip Clayton and Zachary Simpson, eds., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 635–651.

^[17] On the fruitfulness of combining panentheism and material-mental monism, see Panentheism and Panpsychism: Philosophy of Religion Meets Philosophy of Mind, Godehard Brüntrup, et. al., eds., (Munich: Mentis Verlag/Brill, 2020).

^[18] Others use “theoenpanism” and related words, but they mean something different than what I mean. See Joas Adiprasetya, “Dua Tangan Allah Merangkul Semesta: Panentheisme dan Theenpanisme,” Indonesian Journal of Theology, 5:1 (2017): 24-41; Alan J. Torrance, “Creatio Ex Nihilo and the Spatio-Temporal Dimensions, with Special Reference to Jürgen Moltmann and D.C. Williams,” in The Doctrine of Creation, Colin E. Gunton, ed. (London: T & T Clark, 2004), 91; N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 1093.

The post Panentheism and Theoenpanism appeared first on For The Love of Wisdom and The Wisdom of Love.

Just about every believer — Christian or otherwise — says God creates. Most hold theories about how God originally created our universe and whether this creating continues. But the details of creation theories differ, sometimes drastically.

Some theories take Christian scripture as a historical-literal account of the origin of the universe. This approach leads many to think the earth is relatively young, evolution is false, and contemporary science is suspect.^[1]

The biblical writers depict a three-tiered cosmology far different from how contemporary scientists think of the universe. Scripture depicts the heavens and firmament above a flat earth, and the sky looks like an inverted bowl or tent. Biblical writers say that under the earth is a place for the dead (sheol), a watery chaos, and large pillars. The exact details of these descriptions, however, are irreconcilable with one another.

Other theories of creation embrace key theories in contemporary science. They claim God created the universe at the big bang, for instance, and deity used evolution thereafter when creating diverse life forms.

Many theologians link these claims to theories that say God created the universe from nothing, and deity can and does intervene in it. Some say that in some mysterious way, the divine is the primary cause that determines all secondary, creaturely causes. Most who take this approach think scientific explanations are entirely different from theological ones, because divine causation and creaturely causation are different in kind. Theologians who otherwise try to separate science and theology will occasionally draw from science when it supports their theological convictions.

This systematic theology of love draws from scripture and science. It rejects the notion that biblical writers give a historical-literal description of the universe. This theology affirms major scientific theories like the big bang and evolution, and it aligns with the general features of contemporary cosmology. It draws from theological claims in the Bible, while criticizing long-held theories about how God created the world. The overall aim is an internally consistent theory of creation that aligns well with science, our experience, reason, and key themes in scripture.

Before laying out the creation theory of this systematic theology of love, we need to look at the current creation options.

The Theory of Creatio Ex Nihilo

Since roughly the third century, major Christian theologians have speculated that God initially created our universe from absolutely nothing.^[2] Many Jews, Muslims, and other theists adopted this theory too.^[3] Scholars today often use the Latin phrase creatio ex nihilo to refer to the idea.

Advocates of the creation from nothing view say God initially existed alone, without creation. Maimonides puts it simply: “In the beginning, God alone existed, and nothing else.^[4]” At some point and for some reason, the solitary One created the universe out of absolutely nothing. God made all things, says Augustine, “not from [God’s] own substance…but out of nothing.^[5]”

Theologians offer various reasons for why God decided to create. Wayne Grudem follows the logic of Calvinist theologians by saying God wanted to display glory.^[6] Clark Pinnock says the members of the Trinity wanted to share their love with something not divine.^[7] According to each, God could have remained alone, without ever creating.

The idea God creates something from nothing is not in the Bible.

Creatio ex nihilo isn’t in the opening verses of the Bible. Genesis begins, “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters” (1:1, 2). “When” is a temporal clause, which is important, because it does not point to an absolute beginning of time.^[8] And there is no definite article “the” in the Hebrew text, so it could just as well be translated, “In a beginning,” rather than “In the beginning.”

The Spirit (ruach elohim) creates “while” hovering or vibrating over the “formless void,” “face of the deep,” and “face of the waters.” These phrases suggest something was present when God began to create the universe.^[9] The Spirit engaged materials and forces in the beginning, and God established a life-sustaining order by creating from what was present.

The phrase “formless void” in verse two of Genesis is tohu wabohu. Some translators render it “primordial chaos;” others call it an “amorphous state” or “undifferentiated mass.”^[10] God transforms this chaos rather than conjuring from nothing. These early verses of Genesis also speak of darkness covering the “face of the deep.” This deep is tehom, which also refers to something nondivine. “The tehom signifies here the primeval waters,” says Brevard Childs, which also point so something present in the beginning.^[11]

Biblical Scholars

Influential biblical scholars say Genesis does not endorse creation from nothing:

⁃ “Creation out of nothing is foreign to both the language and the thought of the unknown author of Genesis,” says Claus Westermann. “It is clear that there can be here no question of creatio ex nihilo.”^[12]

⁃ “God’s creating in Genesis one,” says Terrence Fretheim, “includes ordering that which already exists . . . God works creatively with already existing reality to bring about newness.^[13]”

⁃ “‘Nothingness’ is not the picture of the situation at the beginning,” says Mark S. Smith. “Unformed as the world is, tohu va bohu is far from being nothingness or connoting nothingness.”^[14]

⁃ “It can be said that Yahweh is the creator of the world,” says Rolf P. Knierim, “because he is its liberator from chaos.^[15]”

⁃ “Properly understood,” says Jon Levenson, “Genesis 1:1–2:3 cannot be invoked to support the developed Jewish, Christian, and Muslim doctrine of creation ex nihilo.^[16]”

⁃ “The storytellers were not thinking of what later philosophical and theological traditions, speaking Latin as they often did, called creatio ex nihilo,” writes Edwin Good. “In this story, something was there—the empty, shapeless “earth,” darkness, the “abyss,” the wind across the waters.^[17]”

⁃ “At the outset of God’s creation,” says David Carr, “there were three main precursors, with the description of each element building on the others: the uninhabitable formless mass of earth (1:2aα), the dark primeval ocean in which that earth was submerged (1:2aβ), and God’s breath/primeval wind moving over the face of the waters (1:2b).”^[18]

The list of scholars saying Genesis does not support creatio ex nihilo is long, and it includes liberals and conservatives.^[19] But given the prominence of this theory, it’s hard to overemphasize what I’ve been describing. So, again:

Genesis does not support the idea God creates from nothing.

Old Testament writers use a dozen Hebrew words biblical scholars translate “create.” The writers of Genesis typically use bara and asah. These words refer to God’s activity and creaturely creating. There is no Hebrew word that means God created something out of nothing.^[20] The writers of the Psalms praise God as creator, for instance, and their praise portrays the Spirit’s creating in ways that complement or contrast the early chapters of Genesis. But no passage in the Psalms says God creates something from nothing.

2 Maccabees?

Advocates of creation from nothing sometimes appeal to a passage in 2 Maccabees. This book is not recognized as canonical by Protestants, but Roman Catholic and Orthodox theologians cite it. In the passage, a mother speaks to her son:

She leaned over close to him and, in derision of the cruel tyrant, said in their native language: “Son, have pity on me, who carried you in my womb for nine months, nursed you for three years, brought you up, educated and supported you to your present age. I beg you, child, to look at the heavens and the earth and see all that is in them; then you will know that God did not make them out of existing things. In the same way, humankind came into existence (7:27–28).

Some have thought the phrase “God did not make them out of existing things” refers to creation from nothing. But the context of the passage suggests otherwise. The mother witnesses to carrying, nursing, and educating her son. “In the same way,” says 2 Maccabees, “humankind came into existence.” That’s not creatio ex nihilo. The mother plays the key role in creating children, but her egg requires a male’s sperm. The growth of the fetus also requires a womb and nutrients, and environmental factors affect its growth. In short, natal and developmental analogies for creation require multiple causes and, therefore, don’t align with God alone creating from nothing.

If we are considering Catholic and Orthodox scriptures, other creation passages should be addressed. “For your all-powerful hand, which created the world out of formless matter,” says the Wisdom of Solomon, “did not lack the means to send upon them a multitude of bears or bold lions” (11:17). This scripture opposes creation from nothing by depicting the ancient Greek view that God creates by bringing form to matter. Matter is something, not nothing.

There are no explicit references to creatio ex nihilo in the New Testament. The book of Peter offers the most direct statement about God’s creating, however, and it points to God creating in relation to materials. God “created out of water and by means of water” (2 Pet. 3:5). Many scholars argue that the verse alludes to Genesis 1:1-2, because ancient peoples often associated water with chaos.

Other New Testament passages speak of God creating out of “unseen things” (Heb. 11:3) and creation generally. Ancient people sometimes referred to children being created by their parents “from what does not exist.^[21]” Obviously, parental sperm, egg, and womb exist, and we know that various factors contribute to a fetus’s development. Examples of parents creating children “from what does not exist” and God creating from “unseen things,” therefore, point to creating from something, not nothing.

(For the remainder of this essay, click the image below.)

The post Ex Nihilo and Other Creation Theories appeared first on For The Love of Wisdom and The Wisdom of Love.

A gunman killed two children and injured eighteen others at Annunciation Catholic Church. In response, there’s a renewed call for gun reform and a dialogue about how to prevent future shootings.

Many also wonder why an allegedly omnipotent God didn’t stop this.

The killer left messages on his ammunition magazines. One message was a play on the question many are asking about God’s failure to stop the horror. The shooter’s question seems to mock believers. It said, “Where is your God?”

Good question!

God Is Everywhere?

A simple but inadequate response to “Where was God” says God is always present in every place. God is omnipresent, say most believers. I agree.

But “Where was God?” isn’t really seeking the geographical location of the divine. It’s really wondering, “Why didn’t God prevent this tragedy?” Those who ask it typically assume God has the omnipotent ability to prevent shootings like this.

“Where was God?” is another way to ask, “Why didn’t God stop this?”

God Suffers?

Another response to “Where was God?” says God suffers with victims. The Lover of us all was present in this tragic shooting and felt the pain of victims. Just as God suffered with Jesus on the cross, the Fellow Sufferer who understands was in Minnesota with those in harm’s way.

I believe God suffered with the children and suffers with all. But I don’t think saying, “God feels their pain” is enough.

The God who could stop evil but allows it in order to suffer with victims is a masochist. Masochists aren’t loving when they permit evil they could have prevented. “God suffers with us” is important, therefore, but it doesn’t answer to why an omnipotent God didn’t stop the pain in the first place.

We need more than a suffering God.

God Can’t

I believe God can’t prevent evil singlehandedly. With the Minnesota killings, God couldn’t stop the shooter all alone.

As I see it, God loves everyone and everything, and divine love never controls. Consequently, God can’t control anyone or anything, including shooters.

It’s not that God could stop evildoers but chooses not to. I’m saying God simply cannot stop evil singlehandedly. God can’t. (I explain this in God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils. See this link.)

I also affirm the long-standing view that God is a spirit without a localized divine body. God is “incorporeal,” as the tradition puts it.

That means God doesn’t have a hand to grab guns from shooters. And God doesn’t have other body parts to prevent tragedies.

Are We God’s Hands and Feet?

Those who hear me say God is a bodiless spirit often respond that we are God’s body. We creatures with bodies can act as God’s hands and feet, they say. I agree.

But we also have the freedom not to act as God’s body. We must freely choose to cooperate with the Spirit’s call. We can choose otherwise. And sometimes localized creatures aren’t in the right place and time to stop evils with their bodies.

Saying we are the hands and feet of an incorporeal God doesn’t solve the problem of evil.

A Letter from a Concerned Friend

A friend sent an insightful email not long after the shootings. She raised important questions about God’s action — and ours — in response to tragedies like the one in Minnesota.

I call her “anonymous” in the note below:

Dear Dr. Oord,

I’m writing with a heavy heart in the wake of the recent school shooting. Your work on uncontrolling love and amipotence has been on my mind as I try to process these difficult days.

Your emphasis on a divine love that relinquishes control to allow genuine freedom is deeply compelling and resonates with many of the struggles we face in daily life, our own desire to love without controlling, to respect others’ agency even when it’s hard.

But I find myself wrestling with a difficult question, in moments of profound suffering and danger, does love really mean not intervening? Imagine a parent who sees their child stepping into harm’s way but refuses to stop them out of respect for freedom, would that be love? I think not.

So I wonder, does framing God’s love as uncontrolling risk suggesting a divine passivity in the face of evil and suffering? How do we hold together the idea of a loving God who is both respectful of freedom and yet powerfully present, intervening to protect, heal, and redeem?

I appreciate the vulnerability and thoughtfulness in your approach, especially your willingness to rethink traditional attributes of divine power. Still, I’m left asking how uncontrolling love accounts for the urgent moral imperative to act against injustice and prevent harm.

Anonymous

Intervene?

I really appreciate this thoughtful letter. I wholeheartedly agree with the call to act against injustice and prevent harm!

I have three responses. First, the writer seems to assume God voluntarily relinquishes the ability to “intervene.” The writer talks about “allowing” creatures genuine freedom, as if God could choose not to allow it. The writer seems to assume God chooses not to control.

I think God must be uncontrolling. It’s not a choice. God’s nature is uncontrolling love, and God can’t change the divine nature.

This means God doesn’t choose whether to intervene or not, in the sense of controlling others. God can’t intervene, because it’s contrary to the divine nature.

Step In?

My friend rightly says a loving parent would step into harm’s way to protect a child. I’ve sometimes done so for my children and for others.

But the “step in” analogy doesn’t fit a universal Spirit without a body. An incorporeal God can’t literally step into harm’s way like we sometimes can.

I strongly support the view that we are called to use our bodies to protect. But I don’t think God has a body to do the same.

An incorporeal God can’t step in.

Act Against Injustice?

Finally, I don’t think God is passive in the face of evil and injustice. I think God always acts, and that acting is never half-hearted or half-throttle.

We have a moral imperative to use our minds and bodies to protect others. God calls us to prevent unnecessary harm like that in Minnesota. As I see it, this will involve changing gun laws. It will involve changing a culture that glorifies violence. And more.

God acts against harm and injustice and calls us to do the same.

God Needs Us

The thoughtful letter from my friend reminds us that a loving God needs us. God can’t stop violence alone. We need God for this work, because we rely upon the Spirit’s inspiration and empowering. Fortunately, we can count on God to do that uncontrolling action.

God needs our cooperation for love to win.

Where Was God?

Where was God in the Minnesota school shootings?

I believe God was present to all, suffering with victims, and calling those who harm to do otherwise. But God could not control the gunman or the circumstances. The Spirit’s love can’t control.

God is now calling each of us to make changes that prevent or at least reduce the likelihood of future shootings.

Will we respond?

(For more essays on God’s uncontrolling love, see my website: thomasjayoord.com. I’m also writing a systematic theology of love and posting chapters on Substack. For those chapters, see this link.)

The post Where Was God in the Shootings? appeared first on For The Love of Wisdom and The Wisdom of Love.

The Confessions may be the most influential book from the most influential theologian whose writings aren’t in the Bible. In it, Augustine describes key moments in his Christian conversion and his intellectual development. The book is written as a conversational prayer, as Augustine asks God to help him make sense of life, reality, and the divine.

We Know Time Well

In a major section, Augustine reflects upon time and God’s relation to it. “Is there anything to which we refer in conversation with more familiarity, any matter of more common experience, than time?”^[1] he asks rhetorically. “We know perfectly well what we mean when we speak of [time], and understand just as well when we hear someone else refer to it.”^[2]

Despite the fact that we all experience and know time, Augustine says he’s unable to explain what it is. Past time is no more, he observes, and future time is not yet. In a real sense, therefore, neither past nor future exist.^[3] We experience time in the present, although it quickly becomes the past. “We cannot really say that time exists,” Augustine concludes, “except that it tends toward non-being.”^[4]

Augustine divides time conceptually into smaller and smaller units: years, weeks, days, instants. The present moment, he says, can be “reduced to a vanishing point.”^[5] Measuring time precisely is difficult, because we only see changes in the phenomena of the universe.^[6] Time itself cannot be seen.^[7]

Time is Just in Our Heads

What began with Augustine saying we all experience time ends in him claiming time is only an aspect of our subjectivity. It’s just in our heads. Past, present, and future are not objectively real, he says, but “three realities in the mind.”^[8] The past is in our memory, the present has our attention, and the future is our expectation.^[9] “Time is nothing other than tension,” says Augustine, “and I would be very surprised if it is not tension of consciousness itself.”^[10]

Why would Augustine give up believing in the objective reality of time? A major part of the answer seems to be his view that the unchanging is better than the changing. “I saw quite plainly and with full conviction that anything perishable is inferior to what is imperishable,” he says, “and what is constant and unchanging [is] better than what can be changed.”^[11] Augustine’s convictions are influenced by Neo-Platonic philosophy’s preference for the changeless and timeless.

Augustine’s conclusion that time is not real and that the best is imperishable aligns with him thinking God is timeless. God is “before all things past and transcends all things future in the sublimity of an eternity which is always in the present,”^[12] he says. In God’s “eternity nothing passes but all is present.” “Nothing can happen to you,” he says to God, “in your unchangeable eternity.”^[13] For God is “above all temporal change.”^[14] And deity “knows all at once,” says Augustine, “without any succession of time.”^[15]

In fact, Augustine believes God made time.^[16] “You made all eras of time and you are before all time,” he says to God, “and there was never a ‘time’ when time did not exist.”^[17] In other writings, Augustine says time is a “creature.”^[18] However, he never explains how God creates time and yet it not be objectively real.

Obstacles to a Timeless God

The claim that a timeless God created time leads to numerous problems. A critic might ask, for instance, what God was doing before creating time. This is a problem, because “doing” is a time-oriented word. Augustine responds to this worry by calling it nonsense. There was no time before God created it, he says, so God wasn’t “doing” anything.^[19]

Augustine’s response doesn’t solve problems that arise from thinking God is timeless. After all, creating is also a timely activity. To say God created before time was created makes no sense, because “timeless creating” is oxymoronic. Augustine admits to having no solution to this problem.^[20]

God’s creating also implies a change in God: from not creating, then, to creating. But Augustine believes God can’t change in any way. He acknowledges this problem but has no answer. “What I do not know,” Augustine says, “I do not know.”^[21] We can appreciate Augustine admitting he’s ignorant but, as I will argue, reject his views about God and time.

Criticizing Augustine’s Ideas about God and Time

Had Augustine accepted the truth of his own experience, he may have seen the virtue of thinking time is an experiential non-negotiable. By “experiential non-negotiable,” I mean a truth about reality we inevitably live out in practice, even if we deny it with our words. Rather than thinking time is merely in our minds, we’re better off believing it an essential element of existence. Living temporally is an experiential non-negotiable, because we all experience the reality of time.^[22]

Second, Augustine mistakenly thinks time is a creature. Time is not an object existing in the universe, or a substance inside our bodies. It’s not something in addition to what exists but a constituent factor in or of all that exists. This is partly why physicists speak of “space-time” to describe actually existing entities. What exists is in process.^[23]

Third, we are wise to think time is a factor in God’s experience too. The becoming Spirit of love is inherently time-oriented. God has a history, in the sense that deity has a past.^[24] God experiences in the present moment, because time is a necessary feature of the Spirit’s ongoing becoming. God’s experiencing is temporal and sequential.

God, Time, and Scripture

Had Augustine paid closer attention to the ways biblical writers describe God, he may have abandoned his Neo-Platonic belief that God is timeless. The overwhelming majority of writers describe God as timefull rather than timeless, as temporal rather than nontemporal, as a personal Experiencer rather than changelessly impassible. The God of scripture is not timeless.^[25] (See the essay, “A TimeFull God of Providence”)

Fourth, saying that God always experiences time allows one to say God existed before our universe began. A timeless God can’t exist before creating, because there is no “before” for a timeless God. “If there is no time prior to creation,” explains R. T. Mullins, “then one cannot make the biblical affirmation that God exists before creation.”^[26] Both those who embrace creatio ex nihilo and those who reject it should say the Spirit acts timefully — in the sense of a succession of moments — rather than timelessly.

Fifth, Augustine’s preference for the immutable and timeless led him think a time-oriented and changing creation is not worthy of love. As we saw in earlier chapters, Augustine believed that only the most valuable, timeless, and immutable deserves love. That’s God. We should not love creatures for their own sake, he says, and God does not love creation for its own sake. This world-devaluing perspective has negatively influenced countless believers.^[27]

Internal Inconsistency in The Confessions

Finally, The Confessions has a recurring internal inconsistency. Over and over in the book, Augustine prays in conversation. He famously says to God, for instance, “Give me what I love, for I love, indeed, and this love you have given me.”^[28] And he says, “You, Lord … have taken pity on us who are earth and ashes, and so it was pleasing in your sight to give new form to my deformity.”^[29] And so on.

Here’s the internal inconsistency: it makes no sense to ask God to “give” something or “have pity” if God is unchanging and unemotional. An immutable, impassible, and timeless deity can’t respond to a creature’s request, and it cannot have pity. And we cannot please a God who feels no emotion. Augustine’s God can’t change from not giving to giving, from not having pity to pity, or from not being pleased to pleased. The Confessions is a contradiction.

(This is a portion of chapter eight of the systematic theology of love in progress. Free subscribers to my Substack get a portion of this chapter; paid subscribers get the entire chapter and all others. In addition, paid subscribers [only $8 a month] will be mentioned in the published book’s acknowledgements and get a signed copy. Consider subscribing here!)

The post Augustine’s View of God & Time appeared first on For The Love of Wisdom and The Wisdom of Love.

Many people are surprised to learn that leading theologians of yesteryear denied God has the attributes or abilities that writers of scripture assume describe God. Some contemporary theologians also deny them. They worry that imagining God in these ways leads to projecting human features and foibles upon the divine. It’s little surprise, therefore, that these theologians do not write books, as I do, called A Systematic Theology of Love.

In this chapter, I defend claims about God that are obvious to most believers but rejected by leading systematic theologians. But one of my primary claims is novel. I argue that God has an essence-experience binate. This means that the living Spirit’s experience changes moment by moment in relations with creatures, but the divine nature is unchanging. Because of this essence-experience binate, the living Lover of all relates, feels, and acts as a changing person. But unlike creatures, the Spirit whose essence is unchanging cannot be tempted to harm and never does evil when feeling negative emotions.

Non-Relational Theologians

To begin exploring what it means to say God is a Person who relates and feels emotions, let’s look briefly at a few theologians who oppose these ideas. Thomas Aquinas rejects the idea God is relational, as one example, if “relational” is understood as creatures and/or creation influencing God. “A relation of God to creatures is not a reality in God,” says Aquinas bluntly.^[2] Instead, relations are “ascribed to God only in our understanding.”^[3] In other words, we perceive the Spirit as relational, but God actually isn’t.

If Aquinas is right, numerous biblical statements are false. People can’t bless God, for instance, although the Psalmist repeatedly urges them to do so (e.g., Ps. 103). A non-relational God can’t respond to us by forgiving sin, although this idea seems central to scripture and Christian piety (e.g., 1 Jn. 1:9). If Aquinas is right, the covenants God makes with creation and the Spirit’s reactions when humans break them are illusions (e.g., Gen. 9:11; Ex. 19:5; Deut. 7:9, 31:8; 2 Chron. 7:14; Is. 54:10; Ps. 103:17-18; Heb. 9:15). And so on.^[4]

The theologian Anselm takes a similar approach. He rejects divine relations and feelings when he explores God’s compassion. “How are you a compassionate God and, at the same time, passionless?” he asks in prayer. “If you are passionless, you do not feel sympathy. And if you do not feel sympathy, your heart is not retched from sympathy for the wretched. But this is to be compassionate.” In these lines, Anselm is admitting that compassion requires feelings and relational influence. “But you don’t have either passion or sympathy,” he concludes, “so how can we call you compassionate?”

Anselm answers his own question: “When you behold us in our wretchedness, God, we experience the effect of compassion. But you do not experience the feeling of compassion. Therefore, you are both compassionate because you do save the wretched and spare those who sin against you, and also not compassionate, because you are affected by no sympathies for wretchedness.”^[5] Anselm believes, in other words, creatures cannot affect God, and the Spirit cannot feel emotional responses. We may think God is compassionate, says Anselm, but that’s not the truth of the matter.

The Jewish theologian Maimonides agrees with Aquinas and Anselm. He applies these ideas to feelings. “[God] is not affected by external influences, and therefore does not possess any quality resulting from emotion,” says Maimonides. He asks rhetorically, “How could a relation be imagined between a creature and God, who has nothing in common with any other being? …Consequently, there is no relation between Him and any other being.^[6]”

Notice that Maimonides assumes the Creator is entirely unlike creatures. God cannot relate with or feel responses, because Maimonides thinks God is immaterial, unaffected, and timeless.^[7] None of what Maimonides says here fits the common view of God in Hebrew and Greek scriptures, however. And these ideas oppose the fundamental elements of love.

The Spirit is Relational

The claims of Aquinas, Anselm, and Maimonides point to what’s at stake when we say the Spirit is a relational person who feels. These theologians believe creatures can’t affect God. In terms of love, they say divine love is only outgoing benevolence with no mutual relationship whereby deity is influenced. God gives to creatures but never receives from them.

By contrast, this systematic theology says the fundamental elements required for love includes giving and receiving in real relations. This applies to creatures and Creator. For the Spirit to relate with creatures, therefore, means She influences them, and they influence Her. God is “passible,” to use the classic term. The Spirit is affected, receives, suffers, responds, feels, rejoices, is vulnerable, reconciles, and emotes in relations with others.

The Spirit’s love is outgoing benevolence and receptive empathy. These dimensions of the divine life only make sense if we believe the Spirit engages in real relations with creation, in the sense of mutual influence.^[8] A Spirit both empathetic and benevolent can actually be compassionate. This deity feels and reacts to creatures — including those who suffer — to promote their well-being.

To say the Spirit relates with creatures is to make claims about causation. God exerts causal influence upon others, and others exert causal influence upon God. By “causation,” I don’t mean creatures control God or that God controls them. Instead, I mean causation in terms of having a real affect, in the sense of influence. The Spirit who loves exerts efficient causation, to use Aristotelean categories, not just formal or final causation.^[9] But never sufficient causation.

The Bible

The Bible is packed with passages depicting God as relational. And the Spirit who loves often responds emotionally.^[10] Here’s a small sample of the many passages one could cite:

– The Lord regrets that he made humans, and “his heart was deeply troubled” (Gen. 6:6).

– God “hears” the cries of Israel and is “concerned about their suffering” (Ex. 3:7).

– God “hears the groaning of the sons of Israel” and remembers the covenant (Ex. 6:5).

– God self-identifies as a “jealous God” and “unswervingly loyal” (Ex. 20:5, 6).

– God encounters a stiff-necked people, has anger that “burns.” But God “relents” and does not bring disaster (Ex. 32:9-14).

– Being “a compassionate God,” God will “not forget the covenant with your fathers” (Dt. 4:31).

– God “remembers his covenant” and “relents according to the greatness of his lovingkindness” (Ps. 106:45).

– “My lovingkindness will not be removed from you, and my covenant of peace will not be shaken,” says the Lord of compassion (Is. 54:10).

– God feels sorrow about the disaster brought on Judah (Jer. 42:10).

– God is “jealous” and “takes pity” on the people (Joel 2:18).

– God “has compassion” for Israel (Hosea 11:8-9).

– God takes “great delight” and “rejoices” (Zeph. 3:17).

– God gets “extremely angry” when the nations make disasters worse (Zech. 1:15).

– Paul warns readers to “not grieve the Holy Spirit of God” (Eph. 4:30), which implies that creaturely action can sadden God.

– James says, “The Lord is full of compassion and is merciful” (5:11).

Jesus envisions the Spirit as relational too. He says God is an Abba (Father) who responds to children, and Abba’s responding is intimately relational (Mk 14:36). In a story about a wayward son, Jesus describes God as a forgiving father who “felt compassion” for a lost son (Lk. 15:20).^[11] In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus encourages his listeners to imitate the Spirit’s relational love: “be compassionate as God is compassionate” (Lk. 6:36).^[12]

Relational Forms of Love

These passages and others indicate that the Spirit’s giving-and-receiving love takes many forms. Let me mention three briefly. First, the Spirit expresses agape by responding to sin with forgiveness and healing. These activities assume interactive relationship. Often, God is angry or disappointed when creatures hurt one another or creation more generally. The Spirit experiences negative emotions and yet responds with agape. Deity repays evil with good, and we should do the same (Lk. 6:27-31, Rm. 12:21, 1 Thess. 5:15, 1 Pt. 3:9).

God also expresses giving-and-receiving philia love with creatures (Ex. 33:12; 2 Chr. 20:7; Is. 41:8; Jas. 2:2; Js. 2:23; 2 Tim. 3:2; Tit. 3:4). Because the Spirit who loves is relational, God enjoys friendships and engages in covenant. As the Psalmist puts it, “The friendship of the Lord is for those who honor him, and he makes his covenant known to them” (Ps. 25:14). And this friendship includes warm feelings of divine affection and fellowship (Dt. 10:15).

The Spirit’s relationality is evident in divine eros too, as God evaluates and values creatures (2 Tm. 4:8; Jn. 12:43; Hb. 1:9). God sees that creation is good (Gen. 1), for instance, and responds with feelings of pleasure. God loves the world so much that the Spirit gives Jesus so that those who believe might have eternal life (Jn. 3:16). Eros, as I will argue in future chapters, is also a major force in God’s creating.

(The previous is a portion of seven of the systematic theology of love I’m writing. Find the full chapter on my Substack account. Free subscribers get a portion of the chapter; paid subscribers get the entire chapter. In addition, paid subscribers [only $8 a month] will be mentioned in the published book’s acknowledgements and get a signed copy. Consider subscribing!)

The post The Spirit as a Relational Person Who Feels appeared first on For The Love of Wisdom and The Wisdom of Love.

A Teenage Holy War

The Amazon Prime, three-part documentary series is subtitled “A Teenage Holy War.” One summary says this:

“Teen Mania captivated a generation of Millennial kids with religious experiences through Acquire the Fire rallies; but beneath the surface lurked boot camps, staged martyrdom drills, and fascism disguised as faith, transforming teens into soldiers.”

The summary is pretty accurate, albeit short. For many, watching the series brought back a flood of memories, good and bad emotions, and questions about ourselves.

The Bad Conclusion

Although I enjoyed the storytelling on the Teen Mania phenomenon, the last ten minutes disappointed me. Things turned decidedly political at the conclusion.

In the final minutes, the series producers connected their story to contemporary American politics. While I think the connections are real, and I understand (and share) the desire to oppose Christian nationalism, I thought the conclusion likely misrepresented Luce’s motivation and Teen Mania’s goals.

The last minutes on the political dimensions stood somewhat at odds with the last scenes of Luce and his ministry. Teen Mania is reported as having gone bankrupt, so the film is giving the viewers an answer to their implicit question, “So what’s Ron Luce doing now?” He’s shown speaking in countries outside the US. We’re told that Luce’s current methods are similar to his Teen Mania work, but he uses different labels.

Ron Luce’s Motivations

Throughout the three-part series, viewers were constantly hearing that Ron Luce was fighting a culture war with, and on behalf of, teenagers. Luce’s own words support this portrayal. He wanted to evangelize while offering teens a godly purpose and an alternative to evil popular culture. I have little doubt these were among Luce’s motives.

But in the first episode of the series, the producers mentioned another of Luce’s motives. And I wonder if it was even more important to Luce than giving Christian teens a voice. The motive: Luce wanted to see the Christian gospel preached to all people groups and, thereby, fulfill the conditions he believed required for the return of Jesus.

Reaching Previously Unreached People Groups

Ron Luce motivated teens to become missionaries in places outside America. And his motive was not simply that these people might receive the Christian message. Luce believed Jesus could not return to earth until at least some portion of every people group on the planet had heard the gospel.

Here’s the biblical proof text for this view:

“This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come” (Matt. 24:14).

Of course, this passage is open to interpretations other than the one Luce gives it. And most biblical scholars I know would disagree with Luce’s perspective. But he’s not alone in thinking it gives a recipe for the return of Christ.

More than 40 years ago and as a college student, I attended missions conferences in which this verse and Luce’s interpretation were central. Organizers wanted to train young people like me to reach every major people group so that this verse would be fulfilled and Jesus would return. They believed missionaries play a role in bringing about the end of history.

The Incongruent Movie Conclusion

I realize that concluding this Teen Mania installment of Shiny Happy People with an alarm about Christian nationalism will probably appeal to many viewers. And I join producers in opposing Christian nationalism and the harmful things some Evangelicals are currently doing in the US.

But the series conclusion sends a mixed message. Ron Luce is not shown continuing to fight on behalf of American teens and Christian nationalism. He’s depicted abroad, trying to motivate those in other places toward missions.

I wonder if Luce’s primary motivation is preaching to unreached people groups so that the end will come.

Conclusion

I’m grateful for the Teen Mania series. I’m happy the extreme and militaristic tactics Luce and his cohorts used are shown for the harm they caused. I’m also happy to see criticisms of contemporary Christian Nationalism in America. (For more on how Christian Nationalism is prompting young evangelicals to deconstruct, see God After Deconstruction.)

But I think Christians also ought to stop thinking their evangelism could hasten the end of the world. Perhaps they would take issues like climate change, religious pluralism, and diversity more seriously if they rejected the idea of an eschatological escape hatch.

The post Teen Mania Theology – Unreached Peoples? appeared first on For The Love of Wisdom and The Wisdom of Love.