Satan & the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy

Rating:
Summary: Thought Provoking
Review: As a pastor and student of theology, I have leaned more on the Calvinist side of the fence in regards to the free will/sovereignty debate. I understand the implications of different views on God's foreknowledge. My position has always been that much of this issue is mystery and we as finite beings will never fully understand how we can have the experience and responsibility of freedom and yet be created by a God who is omniscient and omnipotent.

The reason, though, that I have always leaned on the Calvinist side is that Reformed theologians always seemed more consistent and cogent in their thoughts. 'Arminian' theology always seemed weak to me. It seemed like it took a middle ground that never cleared up the logical confusion of human freedom and divine foreknowledge. Of course, strict Reformed theology never cleared it up either. It was just comfortable with the logical conclusion that God chooses some to be objects of eternal wrath for His own glory, as well as with the problem of evil in this age. It is honest, but it's honest conclusion does not line up with the God of love who wills that all men be saved. But due to the weakness of Arminian scholarship, I accepted most of classic Calvinism (except for limited atonement) and chalked my confusion up to mystery.

Gregory Boyd's two-fold work in God at War and Satan & the Problem of Evil is the first that I have read from 'the other side' that has provoked me to much thought. I have never been 'open' to openness theology (and have thus never read anything from this stream until now) because of its association with process theology, but after reading Boyd's work I see that openness is not an embracing of process thought. Though I do not agree with everything Boyd has written, his understanding of & respect for Scripture are definitely within the bounds of evangelicalism (regardless of what other reviewers on this site have written- these reviews smack of hyper-Calvinists who think that anyone who is not a strict 5 point Calvinist is a heretic!) The problem of evil and an honest, biblical understanding of foreknowledge are too large of issues to be settled in one book, but this volume has made me think about openness thought in a new light. I recommend it to anyone who is delving into these deep things regarding God's foreknowledge and our freedom & responsibility as His creatures. All glory to Him!

Rating:
Summary: Thought Provoking
Review: As a pastor and student of theology, I have leaned more on the Calvinist side of the fence in regards to the free will/sovereignty debate. I understand the implications of different views on God's foreknowledge. My position has always been that much of this issue is mystery and we as finite beings will never fully understand how we can have the experience and responsibility of freedom and yet be created by a God who is omniscient and omnipotent.

The reason, though, that I have always leaned on the Calvinist side is that Reformed theologians always seemed more consistent and cogent in their thoughts. 'Arminian' theology always seemed weak to me. It seemed like it took a middle ground that never cleared up the logical confusion of human freedom and divine foreknowledge. Of course, strict Reformed theology never cleared it up either. It was just comfortable with the logical conclusion that God chooses some to be objects of eternal wrath for His own glory, as well as with the problem of evil in this age. It is honest, but it's honest conclusion does not line up with the God of love who wills that all men be saved. But due to the weakness of Arminian scholarship, I accepted most of classic Calvinism (except for limited atonement) and chalked my confusion up to mystery.

Gregory Boyd's two-fold work in God at War and Satan & the Problem of Evil is the first that I have read from 'the other side' that has provoked me to much thought. I have never been 'open' to openness theology (and have thus never read anything from this stream until now) because of its association with process theology, but after reading Boyd's work I see that openness is not an embracing of process thought. Though I do not agree with everything Boyd has written, his understanding of & respect for Scripture are definitely within the bounds of evangelicalism (regardless of what other reviewers on this site have written- these reviews smack of hyper-Calvinists who think that anyone who is not a strict 5 point Calvinist is a heretic!) The problem of evil and an honest, biblical understanding of foreknowledge are too large of issues to be settled in one book, but this volume has made me think about openness thought in a new light. I recommend it to anyone who is delving into these deep things regarding God's foreknowledge and our freedom & responsibility as His creatures. All glory to Him!

Rating:
Summary: Well written
Review: I don't have to agree with Boyd's conclusions, no one does. Regardless of whether or not I agree this work was still fantastic. I think it brings balance to any of us who think we "know it all" as one of the reviewers below seems to believe about himself. Human beings will worship anything including doctrinal certainty. What a joke! (how many reviews did that guy write?) I'm sure Satan is pleased to see such an attitude among one who claims to confess Christ.

Anywho, this book is must read for any evangelical. It deserves to be given a fair hearing with an open mind. Don't reject it because it challenges your secure doctrinal standing. Rather, use discernment and pray that God will reveal what needs to be revealed. Lets all try to trust God a little more eh?

Rating:
Summary: Well written
Review: I don't have to agree with Boyd's conclusions, no one does. Regardless of whether or not I agree this work was still fantastic. I think it brings balance to any of us who think we "know it all" as one of the reviewers below seems to believe about himself. Human beings will worship anything including doctrinal certainty. What a joke! (how many reviews did that guy write?) I'm sure Satan is pleased to see such an attitude among one who claims to confess Christ.

Anywho, this book is must read for any evangelical. It deserves to be given a fair hearing with an open mind. Don't reject it because it challenges your secure doctrinal standing. Rather, use discernment and pray that God will reveal what needs to be revealed. Lets all try to trust God a little more eh?

Rating:
Summary: SPECULATIVE 'theology' OF CHANCE
Review: Imagine that God Almighty has a measure of ignorance about how free creatures will definitely decide their futures. This is what is known as 'divine nescience'.

Imagine that the LORD has no 'heads up' in advance of how evil- doers, whether demonic or human, will exercise that wicked
freedom when it comes to personal life tragedies or world-wide
disasters like a Holocaust or Stalin's pogroms. He must use
His 'infinite intelligence/flexibility' to respond to these
divine surprises that catch Him unexpectedly. About all He can
do until evil is freely decided is some limited measure of
damage control.

Imagine that most evil on the planet is purely gratuitous, that is, to no specific purpose, not according to any divine plan and not taken into account on the micro or macro levels of people
in advance. Accidents, tragedy, horror, crime, terrorism, etc.
just happen, unbeknownst to God as to definite specifics. What happens will happen and can only be generally forecasted or
divinely guessed at until it freely occurs.

Imagine a 'theology of chance', whereby God allowed to be built
in to creation a random, unpredictable element of uncertainty
beyond even Omniscience's ability to understand or foreknow with definiteness. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle becomes
sovereign over any Exhaustive Divine/Definite Foreknowledge of
future free agency. Even God cannot know the unknowable. To Him
Who is the Revealer of Mysteries, most of the Future(and much
of the Present until it is settled as Past tense by free agents)
is simply a mystery to the Divine Mind.

Imagine a book incorporating all these imaginative elements and
more (touches of Processistic ideas a la Charles Hartshorne;
strong resemblances to 16th Century Socinian thought; improper
Biblical interpretation selectively taking literal verses
figuratively and man-likeness figures of speech as literal).

That's what you have with this book, imaginative but inaccurate
in its portrayal of Biblical truth. It's one small step from
this book to Rabbi Kushner's 'Why Bad Things Happen to Good
People' or the writings of Lelio Socinus in the 1500's.

Chances are this book was allowed to be published to alert discerning Christians to beware of the latest theological winds
of doctrine blowing in the Church. Those seeking Trueness over
Newness should look elsewhere for Biblical answers about
why evil happens in a Good God's world.

...

Rating:
Summary: Satan is the Problem with this Unbiblical Theory
Review: It's inteeresting to see Calvinist responces to Boyd's excellent thesis in God at War and Satan & the Problem of Evil and their charges of hersy, delusional misinterpretation of Scripture, and so on. Having read both books let me just make a few comments:

1) Augustine's Neo-Platonic 'reading' of the bible on the issue of God's Decrees, the denial of free will, and so on which has become Calvinistic orthodoxy in the West, was never accepted in the Eastern Church and always considered 'heterodox' and not Orthodox.

2) St John of Damascus and the Cappadocian Fathers all distitinquished between God's Decrees and Gods' foresight and did not see the two as 'the same'

3) The 'dark side' of Augustinian/Calvinism is that it makes God the author and ultimate cause of evil in the world, as Boyd rightly objects to because to make God the source of evil is totally unbiblical. just as the denial of libertarian freedon and responsible choice.

4) It is possible that Boyd, in seeking to correct this distortion, has moved too much in the opposite direction and claims clarity in areas (on the basis of a one-sided interpretation of a few difficult biblical texts) which are actually shrouded in mystery because it is really impossible for finite human beings, by logic. to understand the relationship between tme and eternity.

5) I feel Boyd's argumentation in support of his biblical and other evidence would have been a lot stronger if he had been more aquainted with Patristic and Orthododox exegesis and theology (which resolves the problem of the relationship between God's will and our will in terms of the doctrine of 'synergy') as the thinking of the Chruch generaly during its first millinium was actually more clear, more biblical and ballanced in this area than it is in Calvins one-sided Protestant Auguistinianism.

Finally, modern Calvinists tend to argue their case against the freedom of the will by means of a Lockean empirticism (which they get through Jonathan Edwards and the Puritans) and to this extent argue for a complete Netwonian type determinism.

Human beings do not have free will, they can only choose in the direction of their strongest desires and these desires arise through forces extrinsic to both the will and the mind. The are all rooted in God's Decrees, so the arguement goes.

In this detrministic thinking Gods Decrees are such that ALL effects in time (including all human choices) lie folded up, as it were, in the First Cause and then developed in time proceeding with both logical and phenomenal irresistibility with iron-clad necessity.

Effects IN TIME (what actually happens, including all good and evil actions of human beings and fallen and unfallen angels) are never spontaneous or creative (although they may be experienced as such by creatures) because all that happens, happen only by the predetermined will of God.

I will not harp on the neoPlatonic overtones of this accept to say that they are just as present in Calvin as they are in Augustine.

My main point, which is one of Boyd's, is that such thinking can not be found in the bible at all and is no part of God's revelation. It is a Western theological constuction based on Greek Philosophy 'read back' into thje biblical text.

Rating:
Summary: The Problem of Evil War
Review: Satan and the Problem of Evil continues to explore how Open Theism best explains the theological and philosophical conundrums which have plagued believers down through the centuries.

I personally admire Greg Boyd and find much to agree with in Open Theism. However, neither OT or Calvinism has completely won my heart.

Boyd holds that several aspects of the future are as of yet undecided. Others, he admits are in fact predetermined. Rather than a full force Openness this sounds more like a modified openness in which human agency has a limited arena(within divine predetermined parameters) in which to affect the unsettled cosmic future. Either way you look at it it seems God's will still calls the shots.

Most contemporary Calvinists are confused. Paul Helm argues that God willing something and permitting something are diametricaly opposed. Calvin himself argued that it makes no difference wether God permits or determines events. For in permitting them there is a certain determination being made.

What is hard to accept is how Boyd can so confidently assert that Open Theism can actually solve the problem of evil. Saying that God does all he can do to stop a 3 yr old girl from being raped but was unsuccesful due to the hardened will of the criminal surely smacks of an impotent soveriegn. What about the will of the child? Are we able to trust a God who is overpowered by the wills of men? Is the problem of evil really solved here?

Boyd contends that the mystery is not about God's character or plan but about "the complexity of creation." OK....I feel better.

Thankfully Boyd admits we can never truly answer the mystery of evil. But we are assured that evil is never a direct result of God's will. Oh? If he permits it then it surely is a result of God's will. For God willed to permit it. If he is powerless against the hardened wills of rapists then evil is a result of a failure in God's will.

So we see the problem of evil cannot be seperated from the problem of God. We are really back to square one - We live in a world in which evil occurs. We believe in a God who is loving and all powerful. What are we to make of it?

In order to "solve" the problem of evil it seems to me would require that we need redefine the key terms. Not relocate the mystery as Boyd attempts in the trinitarian warfare theodicy.

All that being said I am not one who would seek to vote out certain Open Theists from the Evangelical camp. We are all in this together and so far neither side can confidently claim victory or even should seek to do so.

Buy the book and think deep and hard about the issues.

-Kerry

Rating:
Summary: CHAFF OUTWEIGHS WHEAT
Review: this book is a serious departure from the Bible understanding of God's workings with people on earth.

it seems to me to be highly speculative and philosophic than drawn from a plain reading of scripture's clear texts.

no possible benefit can be derived from pursuing its train of thought.

best to read John Wesley's writings on the subject for a much more accurate view of the Problem of Evil in The Good Lord's world.

CHAFF OUTWEIGHS THE WHEAT
MORE STEAK SAUCE THAN MEAT

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book on Warfare and Theodicy
Review: This book is primarily an open theist book, but one need not be an open theist to agree with its conclusions. In fact, his six warfare theses only require a standard Arminian approach to interpreting the bible. However, the real treasure of the book is the second half, where he deals with prayer, natural evil, and hell. His chapter on prayer is nothing short of intellectually stimulating, his review of the accounts of natural evil are concise and yet systematic. His treatment of Hell, however, is the singularly most fascinating aspect of this book, and it would be well worth one's money just to buy the book for the last 2 chapters on hell alone. However, this book is packed full of philosophical insight that no thinking theist can afford not to read this book.

Rating:
Summary: demonstrates the urgent need for and real power of prayer
Review: This book is the best Theodicy I have read. He has many critics that have mischaracterized his views. This is fresh new and exciting. Most of all it describes how necessary and urgent prayer is for the Christian. This book is worth the read. Be warned you will need your Bible to read along with this, and be prepared to reread text several times. The philosophical argument section (Chapter two) is very difficult if you have not taken a basic Philosophy course or read basic philosophy books. Thankfully the author puts extensive appendixes that give definitions and explain difficult concepts.