Dr Paul Allen

Christians, I think, should be skeptical of claims that God has revealed himself in some private, extra-biblical fashion—think of Sarah Young’s “Jesus Calling” books, for instance, or the wave of “visits to heaven” titles that crested at some point in the previous decade. And yet, it seems like a mistake to wave away all stories of divine encounters as products of deception or self-delusion. In his book Religious Experience and the Knowledge of God: The Evidential Force of Divine Encounters, Harold Netland of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School explores the philosophical and theological grounds for receiving such stories open-mindedly. Travis Dickinson, professor of philosophy at Dallas Baptist University, spoke with Netland about his book. “Experience, all by itself, will not produce Christian belief,” says Netland. “But I think there are cases in which a person who has a particular experience can be justified in believing certain things even without being able to provide compelling r...

Monothelitism was the sort of the last issue in the question of how the human and divine natures related to one another in Jesus. The church had reached this consensus at Chalcedon, 451, that Jesus was one person uniting in himself two full and complete natures – a complete divine nature and a complete human nature. So that he was fully human and fully divine; wasn’t half-human, half-divine. He's fully human and fully divine . And, that did leave the church with tensions amongst some who thought to talk about two complete nature's ran too much risk of leaving you with two persons in Jesus . And since that turmoil continued to trouble the Church, a theologian or several theologians suggested that maybe a way forward would be to say Jesus has two natures but he only has one will. Monothelitism is the teaching that Jesus has only one will. And the other position, of course, was, Dyothelitism that Jesus has two wills. Now, this led to a fair amount of controversy that ...