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Exegetical neutrality

I am making slow (but sure) progress on The Same God? Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures. My background is in the philosophy of language, and particularly the theory of reference and singular terms. The research for this book has taken me to some strange places I never expected to visit (and never really knew about before). One of those is hermeneutics,… Read More »Exegetical neutrality

Does God have a body?

Dale writes: A self is being which is in principle capable of knowledge, intentional action, and interpersonal relationships. A god is commonly understood to be a sort of extraordinary self. In the Bible, the god Yahweh (a.k.a. “the LORD”) commands, forgives, controls history, predicts the future, occasionally appears in humanoid form, enters contracts with human beings, and sends prophets, whom he even allows to argue… Read More »Does God have a body?

podcast 140 – Pastor J. Dan Gill’s The One

Pastor J. Dan Gill was a third-generation Oneness (aka “Jesus only”) Pentecostal, but he started to notice a disconnect between their ways of talking about Jesus and what we read in the Bible.

Necessarily so?

It ain’t necessarily so It ain’t necessarily so The t’ings dat yo’ li’ble To read in de Bible, It ain’t necessarily so In God as Biblical Character and as Divine Reality, the Maverick makes the curious distinction between a Biblical character, and the external reality corresponding to the character. The two philosophers [Aquinas and Spinoza] are clearly referring to the same Biblical character when they… Read More »Necessarily so?

10 steps towards getting less confused about the Trinity – #2 Get clear about “God”

What sort of being is “God” supposed to be? Your answer to this will constrain your options when it comes to thinking about the Trinity. The “Trinity” (in the primary sense of the term) is supposed to be none other than the triune God, the tripersonal God of officially catholic traditions since the late 4th century. In other words, the Trinity and God are supposed… Read More »10 steps towards getting less confused about the Trinity – #2 Get clear about “God”

three dancers - click for image credit

An eternal dance of Three?

Perhaps the greatest issue for Social Trinitarians with respect to the Holy Spirit is “his” personhood.

God and Deus

Bill Vallicella, the famous Maverick Philosopher, just dropped me a line asking whether, when Thomas Aquinas and Baruch Spinoza use the term ‘Deus’, they are referring to the same being. This is a difficult and interesting question. Bill uses the Latin name ‘Deus’, alluding to the fact that both men wrote in Latin. Latin was the choice of the ‘scholastic’ theologians of the 13th century,… Read More »God and Deus