Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2059. The Trinity and consciousness is a question that takes me right to the frontier of what can actually be known about God, and it turns out to sit at the frontier of what the word consciousness is even equipped to mean once it is applied to a divine being rather than a human…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2058. Middle knowledge, in Latin scientia media, is the theological concept sitting at the very centre of Molinism, the framework I looked at in a companion article on this site. Middle knowledge refers to God’s knowledge of what any free creature would do in any possible set of circumstances, including circumstances that never actually…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2057. What Molinism teaches has attracted considerable attention among evangelical theologians over recent decades, and it deserves both a fair explanation and a careful assessment rather than a caricature in either direction. It is a framework developed to explain how God can know and providentially work through history with certainty while human beings retain…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2056. God’s self-sufficiency is the reason the answer to this question is a clear and unqualified no. God does not need us, not for His existence, not for His happiness, and not for His glory. Understanding why that is true, and why it is not the discouraging answer it might first sound like, takes…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2055. God created us, and the reason why sits underneath most of the anxiety that drives people towards religion in the first place, and towards its alternatives too. Why am I here. What am I actually for. Scripture answers this not as an abstract puzzle to be solved but as a statement of identity,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2053. God’s attributes are not a set of competing interests inside a divine committee, however often popular preaching makes it sound that way. If God is perfectly holy and perfectly loving, do those two things ever pull in opposite directions? I hear this question in different forms all the time, and it matters more…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2052. Divine aseity is one of those doctrines that sounds abstract until you actually sit with it, and then it quietly rearranges how you think about everything else you believe about God. The word comes from the Latin a se, meaning from himself, and the doctrine states plainly that God exists entirely from Himself….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2051. Divine simplicity means that God is not assembled out of separate parts or ingredients the way a created thing is, a portion of love here, a measure of power there, a quantity of holiness added on top. He is entirely, undividedly and simultaneously all that He is, in every attribute, at every moment,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2050. Divine immutability means that God’s character, His purposes and His promises never change, improve, decay or shift in any respect. James describes Him as the Father “with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17), a striking image drawn from astronomy, since even the most reliable heavenly bodies cast…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2049. Change his mind is a question Scripture answers in two apparently different ways, and I think both answers need to be taken seriously rather than one quietly explained away. Malachi 3:6 states plainly, “For I the Lord do not change,” yet Genesis 6:6 says God “regretted that he had made man on the…