The Living God

Exploring Divine Providence: Reason, Scripture, Free Will, and the Reality of Suffering

In giving humanity free will, did God take a risk? How does “concurrence” help us understand the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility? How does our understanding of this relate to our understanding of God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and goodness? These questions are asked and answered throughout the world. In this presentation, Dr. Sherif Fahim explores and articulates, from the Bible, how creation depends on God not just for its origin, but for continuation, and survival. History is not guided by purposeless or random forces or without intention. Rather, it is the wise, holy, all powerful, good and righteous God who leads history to an end that he intended from eternity. The biblical doctrine of God’s providence provides us with a caring, wise, loving, powerful and all knowing God whose purposes can never be thwarted.

God’s Sovereignty Amidst Suffering

The Self-Revealing and Accommodating God

In what way can the God who is other be revealed? Must not revelation be received? What, then, is the condition of possibility for the reception of such revelation? Must it not be a revelation that is received secundum modum recipentis recipitur—according to the mode or condition of the receiver? Is it true that if…

Divine Impassibility and Self-Limitation

Anselm of Canterbury writes in Cur Deus Homo (“Why God Became Man”), “For we affirm that the divine nature is undoubtedly incapable of suffering and cannot in any sense be brought low from its exalted standing…” For Anselm, and most of the early Christian theologians, it is paramount to protect the divine nature from any…

“Something Perfect From Something Perfect”: The Dogmatic and Apologetic Functions of Divine Simplicity

Christian theology has long regarded the attribute of simplicity as part and parcel with the classical understanding of God. However, divine simplicity has fallen out of favor since modernity, and the reasons for its rejection are still being rehearsed even until this very moment. In my Eastern-Asian-Indonesian context within the last few decades, there has…

The Aseity of God in the Old Testament Creation Discourses: Implications for Christian Spirituality and Society in Africa

Aseity is a term that derives from the Latin a se, which means “from oneself”: thus, aseity denotes God’s incommunicable attribute of self-existence. God exists apart from and independently of any other being. God is clearly distinguished from creatureliness. John Webster argues that the difference between the Creator and creatureliness is not a “distinction within…