Christian tradition holds not simply that, in Christ, God became human, but that at the end of his earthly career Christ became exalted (possessing andexercising the divine attributes such as omnipotence and omniscience), and yet remained perpetually human. In this paper I consider several models ofthe incarnation in the light of these requirements. In particular, I contrast models that adopt a temporalist understanding of divine eternity with those that adopt an atemporalist one. I conclude that temporalist models struggle to accommodate the doctrines of Christ’s exaltation and perpetual humanity, and that the only viable atemporalist models are compositionalist ones.

Kant follows Christian tradition by asserting that humanity is sinful by nature, that our sinful nature burdens us with an infinite debt to God, and that it is possible for us to undergo a moral transformation that liberates us from sin and from its debt. Most of the secondary literature has focused on either Kant’s account of sin or our liberation from it. Far less attention has been paid to the debt in particular. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of this debt, why Kant regards it as infinite, and what becomes of it for those who undergo a moral transformation.

It is widely thought that God must love each and every human to the same depth and degree. This proposition plays a prominent role in influential versionsof the problem of evil, and in theistic attempts to answer the problem of evil. A common reason cited in support of the idea of God’s loving equally every human is that a perfect being would possess every great-making property and loving equally every human would be a great-making property. It is the argument of this essay, however, that a perfect being cannot in principle equally love every human. This argument is erected upon an unnoticed principle of perfect being theology: for all properties F, if F is a deficiency when had by a human, then F cannot be great-making when had by God.

Graham Oppy has launched the most effective criticism to date of an argument for God’s existence from the existence of irreducible mental states or theirregular correlation with physical states (AC). I seek to undercut Oppy’s central defeaters of AC. In particular, I argue, first, that Oppy has not provided successful defeaters against the use of a distinctive form of explanation—personal explanation—employed in premise (3) of AC; second, I expose a confusion on Oppy’s part with respect to AC’s premise (5), and show that this confusion results in a failure to grasp adequately the dialectical force of (5). As a result, Oppy fails to offer adequate rejoinders to (5), or so I shall argue.