The Arguments of Hebrews 1-2 – Part 2
No, the man Jesus is not the Genesis creator; his and our God is.
No, the man Jesus is not the Genesis creator; his and our God is.
Can someone with two natures be essentially immortal and die?
What is the main thesis of the earliest Christian gospel?
Jesus is God, and God can’t be tempted… yet Jesus was tempted?
And we saw, at the climax of the heavenly scene in Rev 4-5, those present in God’s throne room fall down and worship. (5:14) Whom do they worship? Both God, and the Lamb, as the songs said. (4:11, 5:11-13) But there’s an interesting textual variant. If you look in your old King James Version, which uses an inferior edition of the Greek New Testament, 5:14… Read More »Worship and Revelation 4-5 – Part 6 – An interesting textual corruption
What does Revelation imply about God, Jesus, and worship? In Revelation chapter 4, the author is granted a heavenly vision: After this I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven! And the first voice, which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.” At once I was… Read More »Worship and Revelation 4-5 – Part 2 – Revelation 4
In calling Jesus “Lord,” is Paul asserting that Jesus is God himself?
The news came by state radio, state newspaper, and state television. Great Leader Kim Il-Sung had make a startling announcement.
Hereforth, my beloved son Kim Jong-Il is also your Leader.
What did it mean?
“They are really one Leader” said Jun-suh. Look at their portraits. Are they not one man, photographed slightly differently?
“No,” argued Seo-yun; Kim Jong-Il is the son of Great Leader.
“Well, that would make him also a Great Leader, wouldn’t it?” And we all know that there is just Great Leader. We have been taught this all our lives.
Seo-yun countered, raising an eyebrow, “One can’t be one’s own son…” She paused to let the point sink in.
But Jun-suh was unmoved. He pressed his case. “The Great Leader is one. This goes without saying. Our love and loyalty are for him, and him alone. It is him alone we praise at our festivals.”
“Wait… I was at that recent rally… the Great Leader and his son our Leader were both there!”Read More »A Tale of Three Kims – Part 1
If you suffer from this affliction, I recommend repeated listens.
Somehow I missed this when it came out back in July. Our friend the Tentative Apologist Randal Rauser has a podcast (itunes) now, and he’s done a substantial, no-bs interview of leading Reformed analytic theologian Oliver Crisp, of Fuller Seminary. Listen to it at Randal’s blog here. Crisp does a good job presenting and giving a basic defense of the coherence of the traditional catholic… Read More »analytic theologian Oliver Crisp on the coherence of Incarnation
So next up ch.17. Here it is short and sweet: Supreme happiness requires that if there is at least one divine person, there are at least two divine persons. Suppose, in divinity, there is only one person. Then (1) this person gives supreme love to no one and receives supreme love from no one. (2) Such a person lacks the pleasure of love that one… Read More »Richard of St. Victor’s De Trinitate, Ch.17 (Joseph)
Last time, I explained that Athanasius has not made it clear how the Son ‘inherits’ divine properties from the Father. Yet even if Athanasius could explain how the Son ‘inherits’ properties from the Father, there’s still another problem. Like Arius, Athanasius believes that the Father is simple, and so anything ‘in’ the Father is, strictly speaking, identical to the Father. If the Son is going to inherit any properties from the Father, then surely he’d have to inherit them all. As Athanasius himself realizes, it’s not a question of the Son inheriting part of the Father. It’s a question of all or none.
However, there are certain properties the Son cannot inherit from the Father, on pain of contradiction. For instance, the Son cannot inherit the Father’s unbegotteness. The Son is begotten, but the Father is not, so the can’t inherit the Father’s unbegotteness without entailing a contradiction.
Read More »Arius and Athanasius, part 10 – The Father and Son can’t share all their properties (JT)
“Yes, Mr. President,” stuttered the Fox White House correspondent, “you’re the only true president.”
In the last post, I explained that something is ‘created from nothing’ when it’s produced without any pre-existing ingredients. I also explained that by ‘ingredient’ I mean any sort of constituent which satisfies the following two conditions: first, it exists in the product; and second, it bears its own properties, i.e., it has features that other ingredients in the product do not have, and which the product itself does not have. In this post, I will explain what I mean by ‘pre-existing’.
Read More »Arius and Athanasius, part 3 — Producing something with ‘pre-existing’ ingredients (JT)
I consider comedian Bill Maher to be a fairly funny guy. I don’t care for his politics. But I watched his movie Religulous, and I thought it had some funny and interesting moments. He’s not as smart as he thinks he is. He’s typical of kids who were raised Catholic, who didn’t pay too much attention, and who later sloughed off the whole thing as… Read More »Bill Maher on God and Jesus
The year was 1986. A young George W. Bush visited a psychic. “You have a great future ahead of you,” said the psychic, peering at the lines in Bush’s palm. “I know! My Daddy‘s vice president after all.” “Someday, you will be famous, for you will invade Iraq. Beware, oh ancient land, for Bush himself is coming to subdue you!” Bush was speechless. He couldn’t… Read More »proving that Bush = Sgt. Speedo
Dr. Mike Licona argues that the real, historical man Jesus considered himself to be God.
Evaluating Dr. Craig’s unique take on “two natures” christology, his “Neo-Apollinarian” theory.
0.75x 1x 1.25x 1.5x 2x 0:0000:41:32 podcast 62 – Dr. Dustin Smith on the preexistence of Jesus in the gospel of John Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsPlayer EmbedShare Leave a ReviewListen in a New WindowDownloadSoundCloudStitcherSubscribe on AndroidSubscribe via RSSSpotify Does the fourth gospel teach that Jesus existed long before his conception, even before the creation of the cosmos? Most readers think so. But in this episode Dr.… Read More »podcast 62 – Dr. Dustin Smith on the preexistence of Jesus in the gospel of John
Not possible. But why? (image credit)
Here are some rough-draft thoughts on another line of thinking associated with social trinitarian theories.
God is perfect. Arguably, an absolutely perfect being could not fail to be “well off” – in classical terminology, a perfect being must be happy, must be in a “blessed” condition. Part of perfection is independence. One kind of independence is the kind which comes up when discussing ontological or cosmological arguments for God’s existence – the idea of aseity, or existing but not because of anything else. But here’s another kind of independence or self-sufficiency: not requiring any thing (i.e. any fact not entailed by your existence) to be well off, to have a good life. Perhaps we could call it the divine property of security, or independent or self-sufficient happiness.
Is God as well off as he could possibly be? Arguably not,Read More »Reflections on the Impossibility of a truly lonely Christian God (Dale)