Posts under "Open and Relational Theology"

Where Was God in the Shootings?

September 1st, 2025 / No Comments

The recent shooting at a back-to-school mass in Minnesota has many people asking: Where was God? A gunman killed two children and injured eighteen others at Annunciation Catholic Church. In response, there’s a renewed call for gun reform and a dialogue about how to prevent future shootings. Many also wonder why an allegedly omnipotent God […]

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The Spirit as a Relational Person Who Feels

August 8th, 2025 / 2 Comments

It’s obvious to many believers that God is personal, relational, and experiences emotions. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scriptures routinely describe deity in this way.[1] These abilities and attributes also seem required if the Spirit is loving, because lovers are persons who act and feel in relationships. It makes sense, therefore, for this systematic theology of […]

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The Amipotent God is Neither Externally Nor Voluntarily Limited

July 23rd, 2025 / No Comments

In my systematic theology of love, I argue that believers should reject the idea God is omnipotent. They should embrace the notion that God’s power is uncontrolliong love. I call this “amipotence:” ami=love; potence=power. The amipotent view stands between two adjacent concepts of divine power. SECOND ALTERNATIVE TO AMIPOTENCE One concept says God’s power is […]

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Introducing Gino-Theology

July 13th, 2025 / No Comments

In a recently published Substack essay, I looked at arguments for and against saying God is a being. I propose a new way to think about God I call “gino-theology.” In that Substack essay, I argued that we best think of God as an everlastingly becoming Spirit. That’s gino-theology. By “becoming,” I mean the Spirit […]

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A UNIVERSAL, INCORPOREAL, SPIRIT

June 3rd, 2025 / No Comments

(This is chapter four of my systematic theology of love in progress. I’d love to get your suggestions on how the chapter might be improved. That might include suggestion citations, ideas, grammar changes, and more. Paid subscribers will get a signed copy of the published book and will be mentioned in the book’s acknowledgments. Click […]

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What KIND of God Exists?

March 11th, 2025 / 11 Comments

In my last blog post (“Reasons to Think God Exists”), I noted atypical reasons to believe God might exist. Those reasons come after a yet-to-be-published discussion of traditional reasons people think God exists. Those typical arguments appeal to design, first cause, morality, religious experiences, and so on. In that as-of-yet-unpublished discussion, I also address reasons […]

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Open and Relational Biblical Issues

January 27th, 2025 / 2 Comments

Chad Bahl and I contributed a chapter to a massive handbook on postconservative interpretation. The book is aimed at college students, and our task was to sketch out an open and relational vision. Here’s what we wrote… Open and Relational Hermeneutics Open and Relational Theology (ORT) addresses key questions about biblical inspiration, interpretation, inerrancy, authority, […]

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What is Amipotence?

January 7th, 2025 / No Comments

God is amipotent, not omnipotent. That’s been my argument in several books, but I made the case extensively in The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence.[1] It’s the idea pondered by 140+ essayists in a recently published, two-volume work called Amipotence. I believe theists should reject the notion that God is omnipotent. By omnipotent, […]

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