•  1824
    Wandering in Darkness: Further Reflections
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4 (3): 197--219. 2012.
  •  1612
    Atonement and the Cry of Dereliction from the Cross
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4 (1): 1. 2012.
    Any interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement has to take account of relevant biblical texts. Among these texts, one that has been the most difficult to interpret is that describing the cry of dereliction from the cross. According to the Gospels of Mathew and Mark, on the cross Jesus cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?‘ In this paper, I give a philosophical analysis of the options for understanding the cry of dereliction, interpreted within the constraints of orthodox Christi…Read more
  •  1319
    Eternity
    with Norman Kretzmann
    Journal of Philosophy 78 (8): 429-458. 1981.
  •  1217
    Dante's Hell, Aquinas's Moral Theory, and the Love of God
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 16 (2): 181-198. 1986.
    ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’ is, as we all recognize, the inscription over the gate of Dante's hell; but we perhaps forget what precedes that memorable line. Hell, the inscription says, was built by divine power, by the highest wisdom, and by primordial love. Those of us who remember Dante's vivid picture of Farinata in the perpetually burning tombs or Ulysses in the unending and yet unconsuming flames may be able to credit Dante's idea that Hell was constructed by divine power; and if …Read more
  •  1134
    Omnipresence, Indwelling, and the Second-Personal
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 5 (4): 29--53. 2013.
    The claim that God is maximally present is characteristic of all three major monotheisms. In this paper, I explore this claim with regard to Christianity. First, God’s omnipresence is a matter of God’s relations to all space at all times at once, because omnipresence is an attribute of an eternal God. In addition, God is also present with and to a person. The assumption of a human nature ensures that God is never without the ability to be present with human persons in the way mind-reading enable…Read more
  •  1001
    The Problem of Evil
    Faith and Philosophy 2 (4): 392-423. 1985.
    This paper considers briefly the approach to the problem of evil by Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, and John Hick and argues that none of these approaches is entirely satisfactory. The paper then develops a different strategy for dealing with the problem of evil by expounding and taking seriously three Christian claims relevant to the problem: Adam fell; natural evil entered the world as a result of Adam's fall; and after death human beings go either to heaven or hell. Properly interpreted, …Read more
  •  513
    The Doctrine of the Atonement: Response to Michael Rea, Trent Dougherty, and Brandon Warmke
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (1): 165-186. 2019.
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  •  494
    An Objection to Swinburne’s Argument for Dualism
    with Norman Kretzmann
    Faith and Philosophy 13 (3): 405-412. 1996.
  •  485
    The direct argument for incompatibilism (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2): 459-466. 2000.
    In their rich and impressive book Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza offer an account of moral responsibility in terms of guidance control. On their view, an agent has guidance control in virtue of acting on a moderately reasons-responsive mechanism which is his own, and guidance control is “the freedom-relevant condition necessary and sufficient for moral responsibility.” It is an advantage of this account, they think, that it is c…Read more
  •  442
    Non-Cartesian Substance Dualism and Materialism Without Reductionism
    Faith and Philosophy 12 (4): 505-531. 1995.
    The major Western monotheisms, and Christianity in particular, are often supposed to be committed to a substance dualism of a Cartesian sort. Aquinas, however, has an account of the soul which is non-Cartesian in character. He takes the soul to be something essentially immaterial or configurational but nonetheless realized in material components. In this paper, I argue that Aquinas’s account is coherent and philosophically interesting; in my view, it suggests not only that Cartesian dualism isn’…Read more
  •  360
    Absolute Simplicity
    with Norman Kretzmann
    Faith and Philosophy 2 (4): 353-382. 1985.
    The doctrine of God’s absolute simplicity denies the possibility of real distinctions in God. It is, e.g., impossible that God have any kind of parts or any intrinsic accidental properties, or that there be real distinctions among God’s essential properties or between any of them and God himself. After showing that some of the counter-intuitive implications of the doctrine can readily be made sense of, the authors identify the apparent incompatibility of God’s simplicity and God’s free choice as…Read more
  •  342
    God's simplicity
    In Brian Davies & Eleonore Stump (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, Oxford University Press. 2011.
  •  302
    The Openness of God: Hasker on Eternity and Free Will
    Roczniki Filozoficzne 70 (1): 91-106. 2022.
    The understanding of God’s mode of existence as eternal makes a significant difference to a variety of issues in contemporary philosophy of religion, including, for instance, the apparent incompatibility of divine omniscience with human freedom. But the concept has come under attack in current philosophical discussion as inefficacious to solve the philosophical puzzles for which it seems so promising. Although Boethius in the early 6th century thought that the concept could resolve the apparent …Read more
  •  295
    Revelation and the Veridicality of Narratives
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 13 (4). 2022.
    On Christian doctrine, God is love; and the love of God is most manifest in Christ’s passion. The passion of Christ thus matters to philosophical theology’s examination of the divine attribute of love. But the passion of Christ is presented in a biblical story, and there are serious methodological questions about the way in which a biblical story can be used as evidence in philosophical theology. And these questions in turn raise deeper epistemological questions. How does any narrative transmit …Read more
  •  291
    Prophecy, Past Truth, and Eternity
    with Norman Kretzmann
    Philosophical Perspectives 5 395-424. 1991.
  •  282
    Philosophy, Theology, and Philosophical-Theological Biblical Exegesis
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 13 (4). 2022.
    Religious faith may manifest itself, among other things, as a mode of seeing the ordinary world, which invests that world imaginatively with an unseen depth of divine intention and spiritual significance. While such seeing may well be truthful, it is also unavoidably constructive, involving the imagination in its philosophical sense of the capacity to organize underdetermined or ambiguous sense date into a whole or gestalt. One of the characteristic ways in which biblical narratives inspire and …Read more
  •  278
    Knowledge, freedom and the problem of evil
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (1). 1983.
  •  267
    The True Self and Life After Death in Heaven
    In T. Ryan Byerly (ed.), Death, Immortality, and Eternal Life, Routledge. pp. 65-81. 2021.
  •  261
    Resurrection and the separated soul
    In Brian Davies & Eleonore Stump (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, Oxford University Press. 2011.
  •  241
    Love, by All Accounts
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 80 (2). 2006.
  •  241
    Eternity, Awareness, and Action
    with Norman Kretzmann
    Faith and Philosophy 9 (4): 463-482. 1992.
  •  216
    Personal relations and moral residue
    History of the Human Sciences 17 (2-3): 33-56. 2004.
    To what extent can one be saddled with responsibility or guilt as a result of actions committed not by oneself but by others with whom one has a familial or national connection or some other communal association? The issue of communal guilt has been extensively discussed, and there has been no shortage of writers willing to apply the notion of communal responsibility and guilt to Germany after the Holocaust. But the whole notion of communal guilt is deeply puzzling. How can evil actions cast a s…Read more
  •  213
    Saadia Gaon on the Problem of Evil
    Faith and Philosophy 14 (4): 523-549. 1997.
    Considerable effort has been expended on constructing theodicies which try to reconcile the suffering of unwilling innocents, such as Job, with the existence and nature of God as understood in Christian theology. There is, of course, abundant reflection on the problem of evil and the story of Job in the history of Jewish thought, but this material has not been discussed much in contemporary philosophical literature. I want to take a step towards remedying this defect by examining the interpretat…Read more