My recent book, God Can’t, makes the claim God can’t do some activities. Although this strikes some as unprecedented, John Wesley said it before I did. God Can’t in the Bible Biblical writers said “God can’t” before John Wesley and me. In various books and blogs, I’ve listed biblical passages that explicitly say God can’t […]

A “Four Views” book has just been published exploring God’s im/passibility (IVP Academic). I wrote one of the four essays. Instead of “passible” or “impassible,” most people today use the words “relational” or “nonrelational” to talk about whether creatures influence God. Relational theologians like me wholeheartedly affirm the idea God engages in giving and receiving. Others makes a difference […]

This year marks the 25th anniversary of a book that continues to influence many: The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God (IVP). By “openness of God,” the authors mean God experiences the ongoing flow of time. Like us, God faces an open and not yet settled future. No one, […]

Open and relational theologies say God enjoys moment-by-moment experiences in relationship with others. This important idea affects how these theologies think about God’s knowledge. Open and relational theologies take seriously the reality of time’s forward flow. Not only is existence fundamentally in process, but God also experiences the process of time. God is timefull not […]

Most Christian theologies assume God is essentially timeless. This timeless God foreordains or foreknows all that will ever occur. For these theologies, “divine providence” means God acting with the end already settled. Open and relational theology thinks God is timefull, not timeless. How we think about God’s relation to time makes a big difference in […]

“Who is God?” Is there a question more difficult to answer? And is anyone more foolish than the one who thinks she can give a full and wholly accurate answer? In this brief essay, I will tread where angels fear to tread: I talk about God’s nature. I don’t pretend to offer a full or […]

Many thoughtful believers wonder how best to talk both about God’s steadfast stability and relational flexibility. Unfortunately, even some of the best thinkers end up sacrificing one to affirm the other. Unchangingly Perfect For much of  history, trained theologians in the Abrahamic faiths have sacrificed God’s relational flexibility in their desire to emphasize God’s stability. […]

In the book I’m currently writing, I address the question of heaven, hell, annihilation, and the afterlife. I take the logic of uncontrolling love to its eschatological end. And this process has led me to coin a label for my view, Relentless Love. The Usual Afterlife Theories The logic of uncontrolling love changes the way […]

If God’s love is uncontrolling, what does it actually do? Is God involved in our lives? Or is God like an object that inspires without directly affecting us? Something else? In a recent International Journal of Systematic Theology article, Kevin Vanhoozer offers a dialogue between John Webster’s views of love and my own. Kevin wonders […]

In a recent International Journal of Systematic Theology article, Kevin Vanhoozer offered a dialogue between John Webster’s views of love and my own. In one section, he wonders if my view of God’s uncontrolling love accounts for miracles, including the biblical claim that “even the wind and waves obey” Jesus. I think it does. Vanhoozer […]