In several recent articles and a monograph, Andrew Loke has outlined a particular model of the Incarnation, which he calls the Divine Preconscious Model (DPM). In this article I provide a critique of this model, drawing on recent work by James Arcadi in order to show that there are serious theological costs involved in adopting the DPM.

I argue that moral goodness is necessarily self-predicating. That is to say, the property of being morally good is morally good. I then argue that reductions of moral goodness to natural properties, particularly utilitarian specifications, are not necessarily self-predicating. Therefore, such reductions are not successful. Finally, I consider the possibility of defining the good as “fulfilling God’s design plan.” I show that, under an Aristotelian construal of property existence this property is provably self-predicating.

Many think that Pascal’s Wager is a hopeless failure. A primary reason for this is because a number of challenging objections have been raised to the wager, including the “many-gods” objection and the “mixed strategy” objection. We argue that both objections are formal, but not substantive, problems for the wager, and that they both fail for the same reason. We then respond to additional objections to the wager. We show how a version of Pascalian reasoning succeeds, giving us a reason to pay special attention to the infinite consequences of our actions.

Skeptical theism is a popular response to arguments from evil. Recently, Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne, and Yoaav Isaacs have argued that the theses that ground skeptical theism are either false or limited in scope. In this article, I show that their objections rest on dubious assumptions about the nature of skeptical theism. Along the way, I develop and clarify the ambiguous parts of skeptical theism. The upshot of this is that—once the nature of skeptical theism is made clearer—it is far more difficult to resist.

I explain why my model of the Incarnation avoids the problems with alternative models and reply to objections concerning my model’s coherence with scripture (for example, Heb. 4:15), the understanding of personhood and natures (using resources from Islamic tradition concerning Jesus’s human nature), the concrete–abstract distinction, the human soul of Christ, the lack of the unconscious in Christ, and the incompatibility with a strong sense of immutability and simplicity. I conclude that my model stays faithful to scripture and can help to secure unity in the body of Christ concerning the doctrine of the Incarnation.

The notion of faith has been variously understood throughout the course of Christian intellectual history. It has been common to construe faith in epistemological terms, especially by critics of religious faith. In this paper, I argue that faith, especially faith that is had in the context of relationships, should be understood as an act of ventured trust. This is not to say that beliefs and the evidence for the truth of those beliefs are unimportant. Indeed, I argue that acting on the basis of good evidence is what makes faith virtuous.

The moral argument for the existence of God is a popular and rhetorically effective element of natural theology, but both its traditional ontological and epistemological forms rely upon controversial premises. This article proposes a new variant—the phenomenological moral argument, or PMA—that is exclusively empirical in form. The PMA notes several empirical aspects of moral experience (seven are discussed in the version presented here) that cohere much more naturally with a theistic than with an atheistic account of conscience’s origins. It therefore concludes that divine creation best explains the nature of moral experience, and thus, that God exists.

It might be objected to penal substitutionary theories that punishing Christ could not possibly meet the demands of divine retributive justice. For punishing another person for my crimes would not serve to remove my guilt. The Anglo-American system of justice, in fact, does countenance and even endorse cases in which a substitute satisfies the demands of retributive justice. Moreover, Christ’s being divinely and voluntarily appointed to act not merely as our substitute but as our representative enables him to serve as our proxy before God, so that when he is punished, we are punished, to the satisfaction of divine justice.

The Scriptures suggest that Christians are to grow up into the “mind of Christ” or, as Craig Keener calls it, the “mind of the Spirit.” While there have been a few recent works that discuss how mental sharing between the human person and the divine person(s) might contribute to sanctification (for example, Alston), there are not any that discuss a mereological account of how the mental union works with reference to the bodily resurrection. Since I understand the human’s eschatological union with the divine to be the occasion of theosis, I offer in this paper a metaphysical model of at least one aspect of theosis: a part/whole relationship between the mind of a human and the mind of the Spirit, with reference to the eschatological bodily resurrection. I call the union “mental saturation.”

In Who’s Afraid of the Unmoved Mover? Postmodernism and Natural Theology, I defend natural theology against its postmodern evangelical detractors, including Myron Bradley Penner. Penner rejects natural theology because it attempts to ground knowledge of God in human reason, and he claims that my treatment of Acts 17:16–34 is fatal to my argument. However, Penner does not engage my explication of the doctrine of general revelation. The catastrophic effects that Penner perceives turn out to be only against a straw man of the version of natural theology that I defend.

A key takeaway from the recent volume Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique is that no version of theistic evolution that adheres largely to consensus views in biology is a plausible option for orthodox Christians. In this paper we argue that this is false: contrary to the arguments in the volume, evolutionary theory, properly understood, is perfectly compatible with traditional Christian commitments. In addition, we argue that the lines between Intelligent Design and theistic evolution are not as sharp as most scholars have assumed, such that many who self-identify as Intelligent Design adherents would also qualify as theistic evolutionists.

What Michael J. Murray and John Ross Churchill offer as “Mere Theistic Evolution” is an intriguing proposal that should be taken seriously by Christians who are convinced of the truth of classical Christian theology while also engaged in respectful and appreciative dialogue with the natural sciences. In this essay, I argue that the main theological arguments against theistic evolution put forth in the influential volume Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique are not decisive against mere theistic evolution. The proposal raises many interesting and important issues, and it deserves further engagement.

Many Christian scholars have argued that standard versions of evolutionary theory and orthodox theological commitments can be reconciled. Some theistic evolutionists or “evolutionary creationists” have argued that evolutionary mechanisms such as random mutation and natural selection are nothing less than God’s way of creating. Though I dispute the logical coherence of these attempted reconciliations elsewhere, I argue here that there is little reason for Christians to attempt them, since an accumulating body of evidence from multiple subdisciplines of biology casts doubt on the creative power of the main evolutionary mechanisms. Thus, rather than addressing the question, “Can a meaningful doctrine of divine providence or creation be reconciled with mainstream evolutionary theory?” this essay will address the question of whether Christians should, or need to, attempt such a reconciliation at all.

In this essay we respond to the comments of Tom McCall, William Lane Craig, and Stephen C. Meyer on mere theistic evolution.

Murray and Churchill argue correctly that theistic evolution as they define it is theologically compatible with orthodox Christian doctrines concerning divine providence, natural theology, miracles, and immaterial souls. I close with some reflections on mutual misunderstandings of Intelligent Design proponents and theistic evolutionists that arise because each sees the other as a distorted mirror image of himself.

In this paper, I argue that Plantinga maintains it is possible to come to know that Christianity is true, but only from the inside. Further, since Plantinga argues that one’s judgments about the epistemic status of Christian belief depend upon one’s prephilosophical metaphysical views, his position amounts to the claim that the Christian community has privileged access to truth and that non-Christians are ill-equipped to evaluate their beliefs. The upshot of Plantinga’s position is, I suggest, that people from different communities will disagree about the epistemic status of religious belief, and reason is simply incapable of adjudicating those disputes.

This paper seeks to demonstrate why the existence of suboptimal design in biology does not offer a reason for Christians to reject the biological case for Intelligent Design (ID). In it, I argue that Christians who critique ID based upon alleged deficiencies within biology fail to imagine the various ways in which a divine designer might bring about certain biological effects. That is, such critics presumably envision a simplistic notion of divine causation—where God either directly brings about every biological effect, or is not involved in any biological effect. Such either or thinking, I maintain, is theologically unnecessary.

Giving the impression that perichoresis solves the “threeness-oneness problem” or the “two natures–one person problem” without an explanation of how perichoresis works is problematic; as such, an explanation of perichoresis ought to be provided. I provide one way to address this problem by drawing upon the work of Eleonore Stump. In contrast to approaches that avoid the metaphysics of perichoresis I provide an account of the metaphysics of perichoresis and suggest that a Stump-inspired account of perichoresis—that is, an account that places an emphasis on the notion of sharing some aspect of the mental life—deserves serious attention by those who feel the weight of the problematic use of perichoresis.