Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Volume 6 (2006)
: 15665399
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for the existence of God, nicely elucidates from within how the Christian doctrine
of God means good news in connection with the sensibilities and anxieties of our
time.
[5]
Having said all this, and passing over some small infelicities (such as
the misspelling of some Latin and Greek terms, 226, 261), I still have some major
concerns and questions. The first of these will perhaps be of special interest
to the readers of this journal, since it concerns Shults critical engagement with
present-day analytical philosophy of religion. Shults suggests that by taking
seriously the turn to relationality it becomes possible to dissolve the antinomies
in which standard discussions about Gods foreknowledge, predestination and
timelessness have become entangled. For example, Shults claims that, rather than
taking sides in the Calvinist-Arminian debate about divine foreknowledge and
creaturely freedom, he is able to escape this antinomy by developing a full-blown
trinitarian account of Gods knowledge. We may think of Gods pro-gnosis, then,
as an acknowledging embrace of human creatures, calling them to a new life
of knowing and being known in the Spirit of Christ (224). However, if Gods
activity in this regard is restricted to calling (or inviting, as he puts it elsewhere),
then in fact Shults simply opts for the Arminian horn of the dilemma. There
may be nothing wrong with that, but clearly the authors suggestion that he is
dissolving or overcoming the dilemma is simply false. It is not so easy to really
overcome the classical problems of theology! Although Shults has convinced me
that analytical philosophers of religion have to take the recent developments in
systematic theology more seriously, I dont see how this might make their work
superfluous.
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Secondly, the final part of Shults book suffers from a lack of systematic rigor. Shults does not always make it completely clear why he makes the
Ars Disputandi 6 (2006), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org
American mind. If the trinitarian God is continuously drawing his creatures into
his perfect communion by means of his omnipotent love, why is there so much
resistance and why does the process last so long?
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