Again
Philosophy
Articles listed in order published.
Human Being - Flesh & Spirit
I have become quite convinced that the modern Christian church has, as a whole, once again come to tolerate a particular heresy in its ranks. It’s a tenacious and pernicious heresy, which has its origins in the third century and is known as Manichaeism. A subset of Gnosticism, its central tenant can be summed up as “spirit good; body bad.” Put another way, it’s the idea that the only thing about a person which is good is our spirit. The ideas of this false religion seem to rear their head periodically in the thinking of the church as new generations of the church body forget once again the historical orthodoxy of the faith.
Omniscience and Omnipotence
This question was asked on the Christianity Stack Exchange site:
If God is truly omniscient as in “all knowing”, then God knows everything including the future. But doesn’t this then remove his choice to do something other than the choices he takes in the future he knows of? In which case he is not omnipotent? Or conversely, if he can truly do anything because he is “all powerful”, this has to make the future uncertain even to himself.
How can these two common claims about God be reconciled?
Was the fall of mankind inevitable?
I think this question reflects a common error in our thinking which I call temporal lock - that is, we have a great tendency to reason about the eternal things of God from a temporal and limited perspective.
Who Created God?
This question is not answerable from a Christian perspective; it presupposes God was created, but the Bible clearly teaches that God is eternal (in the truest sense of the word). An eternal being has no creator, no beginning, no end, and no cause. Rather he is the creator of all that is, the beginning and the end of all that is, and the cause of all that is.
Knowledge, Pride, and Truth
Since doctrine and apologetics has been so instrumental in rebuilding the foundations to my faith, I naturally spend a lot of my time reading, studying and immersed in learning more about God’s word and God’s world. However, I got to thinking the other day about knowledge, it’s relative value, and the immense amount of time required to acquire, absorb and internalize (or “own”) it.