Category: RazorsKiss
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Church History and Apologetics Classes
Recently, I had the opportunity of teaching two classes for my local church, on the subjects of Church History and Apologetics.
Chris asked me to post them, so here they are!
Note: I wasn’t professionally recorded – I did it myself – so the quality is only so-so.
Church History: I used a primarily biographical method in teaching a quick overview of the history of the Church – and it’s isn’t nearly as comprehensive as many classes might be. It’s only 12 sessions, so I obviously had to go fairly quickly. This was taught as an introduction to the …
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Theology Drives Apologetic
What we believe drives what we’re defending, obviously. When someone defending another position that claims to be Christian interacts with us, how are we to respond? Many times, that will tell unbelievers as much about us as our interaction with them does. Wes Widner, featured recently due to his citation of Open Theist Gregory Boyd, has criticized Dr. James White in the recent past, quite vehemently.
Most notably for: “misrepresenting and slandering” William Lane Craig, Norm Geisler, etc.
When pressed to give examples on The Dividing Line, Wes was unable to give any concrete examples. In other conversations since, Wes …
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The Significance of God’s Sovereignty
…The Sovereignty of God is an expression that once was generally understood. It was a phrase commonly used in religious literature. It was a theme frequently expounded in the pulpit. It was a truth which brought comfort to many hearts, and gave virility and stability to Christian character. But, today, to make mention of God’s Sovereignty is, in many quarters, to speak in an unknown tongue. Were we to announce from the average pulpit that the subject of our discourse would be the Sovereignty of God, it would sound very much as though we had borrowed a phrase from one
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Open Theism and Pacifism?
Molinism advocate and apologist Wes Widner quoted Open Theist Gregory Boyd earlier today, concerning non-violence. The quote was as follows:
Any peace achieved by violence is a peace forever threatened by violence, thus ensuring that the bloody game will be perpetuated.
This is cited (but not in the tweet, for obvious reasons) from Boyd’s The Myth of a Christian Nation, pg 27. (Excerpt of the book linked here) As no context was provided by Wes, I asked him, via Twitter, the same format I saw the quote in.
In the meantime, while waiting his reply, I performed a cursory …
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The Possibility of Middle Knowledge
I’m going to include the transcript of a discussion I had (along with several others) with a Middle Knowledge proponent that frequents AOMin’s chat channel. The reason I do so is in order to give an example of how the argument I advanced recently functions in an actual discussion.
The discussion was fairly wide-ranging, but I think demonstrates the ability of a consistent return to the nature of God as the foundation of a reply to the assertions advanced by proponents of MK and other similar philosophical systems, over against the Biblical conception of God’s nature and the modal collapse …
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A Further Example of the Importance of Divine Simplicity
My comment: “God is not “driven by” wrath – wrath is an attribute of God’s nature.”
CMP: No, wrath is a response of another attribute, namely righteousness. But that is not really the point of this post.
…Jugulum: I actually agree w/him on “wrath”. Wrath isn’t an attr. because God’s wouldn’t be wrathful if he hadn’t created. God was/is/will-be eternally holy/righteous, which includes the trait, “I will be wrathful toward sin”. You might call that a “attr. of wrath”, but I think that was the distinction CMP was making. Similarly, God wasn’t eternally merciful, apart from a sinful creation. Mercy
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The Consequences of Evidentialism
If you were able to go back in a time machine and witness the tomb of Christ only to find that Christ did not raise from the grave, what would that do to your Christian faith?
(A Quick Question – @Parchment and Pen)
Note the poll to the side, and the responses.
What’s wrong with this? My wife nailed it in about 8 seconds. (She gets an A in my apologetics class!)…
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Attributal Argument for God’s Ordination of Possibility
This argument is an attempted formalization of the discussion found in my recent post God is Sovereign over Possibility. It’s intent is to demonstrate that the “all possible worlds” framework that is very commonly used is incompatible with Christian doctrine and the Scriptural revelation of the nature of the Triune God. If you have any possible defeaters, please post them in the comment section. Thanks!…
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On Divine Simplicity and Malformed Arguments
Reformed theology, as properly expressed, considers the doctrine of God’s unity not as the classical formulation used by Aquinas and the Scholastics, but as a unity of being; in which all attributes of God are distinct in their display, necessarily interrelated but not identical to each other, despite being differentiated expressions of God’s singular, essential nature. The Scholastics (following the lead of earlier writers) may be summed up as follows: “It is commonly said in theology that God’s attributes are God himself, as he has revealed himself to us… It was further asserted by the Scholastics that the whole essence …
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Anthropic Arguments and Assumptions
If God is morally perfect then He must perform the morally best actions, but creating humans is not the morally best action. If this line of reasoning can be maintained then the mere fact that humans exist contradicts the claim that God exists.
Look at the assumption required for the second half of this sentence. “creating humans is not the morally best action”. Says who? By what standard? As usual, I think we can guess what that is.
Walker suggests that God is morally culpable for creating human beings with defective natures (defective in comparison to God’s).
Is …