Paul K Moser

How, according to the best Biblical theodicy, does God justify God's allowing extreme suffering and evil? According to this article, the Biblical God is Lord of the future as well as the present and uses the future to fulfill divine promises to humans. The future fulfillment, coupled with present divine proximity to humans, includes restoring and saving them in full righteousness, given their losses from suffering and evil. This lesson is part of a widely neglected Biblical theodicy of restoration for humans in divine righteousness at God's appointed time. Such righteousness aims to renew people for their lasting moral good in relationship with God and others. Benefiting from some Old Testament writers, the apostle Paul, and Jesus, the proposed theodicy illuminates God's intention in bringing about a world that undergoes severe suffering and evil. It fits with humans' 'knowing in part' and thus their being unable to justify God, but it leaves room for God justifying God in righteousness to be fulfilled, coupled with present divine proximity to humans in need.

Many philosophers and theologians try to add credibility to Christian faith by means of philosophical arguments and explanations. There are two main ways to pursue this aim, and one way is arguably more defensible than the other, at least from the perspective of the apostle Paul. Philosophers and theologians who hold that Paul has a contribution to make in this area should consider the relative efficacy of these two ways. The key area of contrast lies in the epistemic basis of relevant philosophical arguments and explanations: either a basis in the power of direct divine selfmanifestation or a basis just in philosophical claims. The latter basis will neglect or obscure the power distinctive of the Christian God and thus miss out on foundational evidence characteristic of that God. This article clarifies what that power is, in terms of responsive divine self-manifestation as God's self-witness to divine reality and goodness in receptive human moral experience and character formation. The article explains how such power, being interactive toward divine righteousness, serves as a significant alternative to such prominent philosophical overlays on Christian faith as Platonism, Thomism, and Kantianism. The latter overlays improperly depersonalize key evidence for God's reality and goodness.

Religious epistemology can benefit from the widely neglected perspective of the apostle Paul that humans can "have the mind of Christ. " This article considers whether humans can apprehend divine reality, if only partly, from a divine vantage point. Perhaps humans then can apprehend the reality and goodness of God in a salient manner, thereby gaining a vital perspective on ultimate reality. The article aims to identify the viability of a "God's-eye standpoint" for humans in "the mind of Christ. " It contends that this standpoint draws from influential volitional and affective traits of God's personality, including "the fruit of the Spirit.

Talk of divine glory (kabōd) emerges early in the Pentateuch, and it recurs in the historical writings, the prophetic writings, and the Psalms. The book of Exodus is seminal here. Its talk of divine glory points to something that can be seen by God's people. Moses and Aaron promise the Israelites: 'In the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your complaining against the Lord' (Exod 16:7, NRSV, updated version, here and in subsequent Biblical translations unless otherwise noted). The elaboration is: 'As Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the Israelites, they looked towards the wilderness, and the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud'

This article develops some insights of the apostle Paul and Peter T. Forsyth on a teleological approach to a theodicy. Paul claims that God causes some human suffering in order that people overcome it by enduring and conquering it. This conquering relies on humans choosing lives that hope for and collaborate with divine compassionate righteousness. The article shows what a theodicy looks like given this Pauline position. As an effort to justify God's treatment of suffering, evil and delayed rescue of humans in the world, a theodicy raises a twofold issue: Does God have good reasons to allow the suffering and the evil that exist; and if so, do humans have access to those reasons? The article considers a God worthy of worship who aims to cultivate compassionate righteousness in humans, using suffering and evil but not coercion of human wills towards him. Theodicy can succeed in this context as God can give meaning to, and a final righteous co-conquest of, suffering and evil. Résumé Cet article développe certaines idées de l'apôtre Paul et de Peter T. Forsyth sur une approche téléologique d'une théodicée. Paul affirme que Dieu cause certaines souffrances humaines afin que ceux qui les subissent les surmontent en les endurant et en les dominant. La clé de cette victoire se trouve dans le choix fait de s'attendre à, et de collaborer avec la justice compatissante de Dieu. L'article montre à quoi ressemble une théodicée reposant sur cette position paulinienne. En tant qu'effort pour justifier la façon dont Dieu traite la souffrance, le mal et le sauvetage tardif des humains dans le monde, une théodicée soulève une double question : Dieu at -il de bonnes raisons de permettre la souffrance et le mal qui existent ? Et si oui, les humains ont-ils accès à ces raisons ? L'article envisage un Dieu digne d'être adoré dont le but est de cultiver une justice compatissante dans le coeur des humains, en utilisant la souffrance et le mal, mais sans exercer

How can the Biblical God be the Lord and King who, being typically unseen and even self-veiled at times, authoritatively leads people for divine purposes? This article's main thesis is that the answer is in divine moral leading via human moral experience of God (of a kind to be clarified). The Hebrew Bible speaks of God as 'king,' including for a time prior to the Jewish human monarchy. Ancient Judaism, as Martin Buber has observed, acknowledged direct and indirect forms of divine rule and thus of theocracy. This article explores the importance of divine rule as divine direct leading, particularly in moral matters, without reliance on indirect theocracy supervised by humans. It thus considers a role for God as Über-King superior to any human king, maintaining a direct moral theocracy without a need for indirect theocracy. The divine goal, in this perspective, is a universal commonwealth in righteousness, while allowing for variation in political structure. The article identifies the importance in the Hebrew Bible of letting God be God as an Über-King who, although self-veiled at times, leads willing people directly and thereby rules over them uncoercively. It also clarifies a purpose for divine self-veiling neglected by Buber and many others, and it offers a morally sensitive test for unveiled authenticity in divine moral leading.

Many people in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic monotheistic traditions testify to their experience of being commanded by God to do something or to be a certain way. Is this kind of testimony from experience credible in some cases, and, if so, on what ground? The main thesis of this article is that it is credible in some cases and a suitable ground is available in the morally purifying experience of the human conscience. The article looks to the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur'an for relevant testimony to the importance of righteous divine commanding experienced by humans. The relevant commands are not abstract or merely theoretical but grounded in human moral experience and potentially motivating for righteous action. The article doubts that God would be God if there were no divine commanding given directly to receptive people in their moral experience. It contends that God would not be a morally righteous guide of the divine kind needed for the worthiness of worship by humans in the absence of God's commanding people directly in their experience.

The communion (koinōnia) of the Spirit calls for moral rapport with God, based on the reception of divine righteousness in the "fruit of the Spirit" among humans. This article explains the centrality of such moral rapport to the koinōnia of the Spirit, on the basis of insights from the book of Genesis, some of the Hebrew psalmists, and the apostle Paul. It gives special attention to Paul's perspective on the "fruit of the Spirit," thereby identifying distinctive evidence for the reality and the goodness of God, by way of contrast with either a purely mystical or a purely intellectual approach. Paul offers a perspective including "koinōnia of Jesus Christ," pointing to his koinōnia with God in Gethsemane and thus confirming the central role of moral and volitional personal rapport with God. This approach gives moral and christological depth to the koinōnia of the Spirit, enriching it with divine righteousness.

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Scholars of the Bible have long sought a theme that can identify substantial unity in the various Biblical writings without disregarding their undeniable diversity. In this context, scholars have explored the nature and limits of Biblical inspiration in considerable detail, but the moral inspiration of humans by God has received relatively little attention. This neglect is striking, because such divine inspiration of humans is arguably a silver lining throughout the Bible and a source of robust unity for Biblical theology. This article contends that the moral inspiration of humans by God is a substantial unifier for Biblical theology. It also shows how this approach yields (a) a new understanding of the fruit of the Spirit as divine filial values in human experience and (b) a needed veracity check on the unified Biblical theology offered.

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The most prominent obstacle to hope and faith in God is an experienced world evidently at odds with the goodness and thus the reality of God. This obstacle gets traction when combined with the assumption, found in many Biblical narratives, that God merits worship and trust from humans owing to impeccable divine goodness. This article examines whether, and if so how, God can avoid the charge that divine failure to eliminate or to reduce actual human suffering disqualifies God from being worthy of worship and trust. We thus ask whether God merits the benefit of the doubt regarding a charge of divine neglect for evil human suffering. This leads to the key issue of the adequacy of a vantage point from which divine goodness is assessed. If a particular human vantage point is so narrow as to be misleading regarding divine goodness, it can be inferior to other available vantage points. Clarification of this lesson opens the door to a widely neglected vantage point of a 'showinghow theodicy' in contrast with an 'explaining-why theodicy.' The former theodicy fits with many of the Biblical narratives, and it enables God to merit the benefit of the doubt regarding a charge of divine inadequacy toward human suffering.

The perception of God by a particular human does not require that all other humans have access of any direct kind to this perception or to any other perception of God, because God can hide from the perceptual experience of (some of) these other humans. We shall see that humans are not in a position by themselves to remove divine hiding from their perceptual experience, even if they can put themselves in an improved position for perceiving God. The main causal factor is God's choosing to self-manifest in human perception at God's opportune time, and that factor is not fully controlled by humans. We thus need an account of perceiving God that leaves room for divine hiding, and I shall propose that the relevant perceiving can be in human conscience under certain conditions. We also need, as we shall see, an approach to perceiving God that acknowledges the importance of a person's evaluative attitude towards perceiving God.

Our expectations for human experience of God can obscure the reality and the presence of such experience for us. They can lead us to look in the wrong places for God’s presence, and they can lead us not to look at all. This article counters the threat of misleading expectations regarding God, while acknowledging a role for diving hiding from humans on occasion. It contends that, given God’s perfect moral character, we should expect typical human experience of God to have moral dissonance, that is, experiential conflict in morally relevant ways. We shall see the evidential or cognitive importance of how humans respond to such dissonance. Our failing to respond cooperatively with God can result either in our obscuring evidence of divine reality or in God’s hiding divine self-manifestation for redemptive purposes aimed at our benefit.

Biblical theology should be grounded in a broad perspective, an Überblick, on the character of God as the main actor in biblical history. Without such a perspective, we will lose sight of what kind of agent motivates the main story-line of the Bible. If our perspective is inadequate, we will fail to recognize how God works in history, including biblical history. Biblical interpreters typically have neglected a key feature of the biblical God: God as righteous agitator for redemptive good in human lives, individually and socially. In doing so, they have failed to give an adequate portrayal of what God is doing or trying to do in history. This article corrects that neglect by acknowledging the biblical God as agitating in history for righteousness among humans as a reflection of God's unique moral character. It explains how such agitating distinguishes God from the gods of deism and determinism, while enabling the redemptive work of this God to be seen not only in biblical history but also in everyday human life. The article relates divine agitation to the crisis of Jesus in Gethsemane in relation to the kingdom of God and to the apostle Paul on dying-and-rising with Christ.

In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard, writing as Johannes Climacus, famously distinguishes two kinds of religiousness, kind A and kind B. He claims that, even though kind A is basic to kind B, including as represented in Christian religious commitment , kind A both has God 'in its ground' and 'can be present in paganism' that is atheist or agnostic. This apparent conflict calls for a resolution, if kind A is to be coherent. This article offers a new resolution with a familiar distinction between God de re and God de dicto, even though interpreters have overlooked the importance of this distinction for understanding Kierkegaard. In addition, the article contends that this distinction is sup-portable from Kierkegaard's own writings, even though he himself did not draw it explicitly. The article also explains the importance of the distinction for understanding Kierkegaard on religious diversity in intellectual content. It proposes that it enables Kierkegaard to offer a compelling position on such diversity, given his understanding of God's perfectly good character and activity.

| What motivated and empowered Jesus to go, willingly, to Jerusalem to undergo suffering and death? He could have chosen to avoid the fatal confrontation in Jerusalem, but he intended to endure it, despite its tragic end. This situation calls for an explanation in terms of what empowered him in carrying out his intention while facing suffering and death. Such an explanation takes us beyond the periphery to the center of Jesus's self-understanding and mission. Jesus understood God as "Abba, Father," in the light of the Hebrew Bible, but he factored in his own experience of God as Abba. This article uses the Gethsemane narrative of the Gospel of Mark to identify Jesus's Abba relationship, asking whether Jesus's obedience in Gethsemane was a means to a more basic end rather than an end in itself. We shall see that obedience is not sufficient for this relationship, because obedient actions fall short of a cooperatively responsive filial relationship with God. Cooperative filial responsiveness to God is central to Jesus's self-understanding. Religious experience of a filial sort plays a key role in the identity of Jesus. In neglecting this experience and the accompanying filial relationship, we fail to understand Jesus and his mission.

If we know anything about Jesus of Nazareth, we know that he had a message about the "kingdom of God." The synoptic Gospels confirm this, if they confirm anything. A challenge arises, however, in our identifying what Jesus thought of the arrival of this kingdom, especially regarding its timing and its role for divine judgment, and what he considered its intended impact on a person's experience, beyond talk about it. If the kingdom in question is just talk, with no intended impact on human experience, it will lack (a) needed supporting evidence (for its reality) and (b) motivational power (for its being compelling). This article examines (a) and (b) in order to arrive at Jesus's core understanding of the kingdom of God. It contends that Jesus presented a dual, two-phased kingdom, with the first phase anchored in a distinctive human experience, but that this dual status prompted widespread misunderstanding among his audience. The article identifies a neglected self-understanding of Jesus as a moral-kingmaker and gate-keeper for God who portrays divine judgment as postponed for the sake of God's redemptive reign.

This article examines the kind of power available to a God worthy of worship, in connection with the prospect for a full theodicy for the world's suffering and evil. It portrays how such a God would seek to relate to people with uncoerced reconciliation to God as a gift having definite expectations of them. To that end, God would be elusive and hidden at times, including regarding ultimate purposes, to minimize the alienation of humans from God. We have no good reason to suppose that God would reveal divine purposes to humans in a way that gives them a full theodicy. Similarly, we have no good reason to acknowledge a certain kind of limitation in divine power over evil, but, given divine goodness, we would expect to have such a clear reason if God had such a limitation. The absence of the latter clear reason counts against a proposed full theodicy.

This chapter focuses on some epistemic concepts and their bearing on theism. It considers the nature of belief both as assent and as a disposition involving trust. It also characterizes foundational evidence of God's reality in terms of divine self-manifestation in human moral conscience, whereby a unique kind of agapē-conviction can arise. BELIEF Some people believe that God exists; others do not. Some people, in addition, believe in God, owing to their favorable commitment with trust toward God; others do not. What accounts for these differences? An answer to that question requires an answer to a prior question: What exactly are these differences? They are real differences, and we shall begin with what underlies them. Belief that something is so (for instance, that God exists) is a psychological state of a person that is related to a judgment or proposition that something is the case (for instance, that God exists). The psychological state in question is an affirmative attitude of a person toward a proposition. It is affirmative in a dispositional manner that does not require constant assent to the proposition , even if it begins with an episode of assent. It thus is akin to my dispositional tendency to scream something when a nail pierces my skin. We do not lose our beliefs when we fall asleep and temporarily stop our episodes of assent. In this regard, belief that something is so is not simply episodic, but has a dispositional component. This component includes one's being disposed to affirm, or assent to, the relevant proposition under certain circumstances. So, if you believe that God exists, you will be inclined to affirm under certain circumstances the proposition that God exists. We need not pursue here the complicated matter of specifying those circumstances. Belief in God is not reducible to or entailed by belief that God exists. It includes, in contrast with belief that God exists, one's being related to God by a favorable commitment with trust toward God. One can believe that God exists without one's having a favorable commitment with trust toward God. Indeed, one can believe that God exists and fully distrust God. A controversial issue is whether one can believe in God without believing that God exists. It seems that one could have a favorable commitment with trust toward God without having a concept of God. For instance, one could have such a commitment toward what guides one's conscience while one fails to conceive of that guide as God. Even though one believes in God, owing to a favorable commitment toward God's role in one's conscience, one could fail to conceive of the being one believes in as God. One then could have a favorable commitment with trust toward God, but not think of the object of one's commitment as being God. This seems to be a live option. So, I do not assume that belief in God requires belief that God exists, even if it requires a less demanding belief that a distinctive object (of one's favorable commitment) exists. We thus can distinguish between implicit faith in God (without endorsement that God exists) and explicit faith in God (including endorsement that God exists).

Philosophy of religion suffers from inadequate aaention to the specific moral character of a transcendent God worthy of worship. This deficiency ooen results from an unduly abstract conception of a transcendent God, including correspondingly abstract notions of divine goodness and power. A Christian approach to God has a unique solution to this problem, owing to its understanding of Jesus Christ as the perfect human representative of God's moral character or personality. This article identifies some important consequences of this perspective for divine emotion and suffering and for human relating to God in a fiing manner, including for human certitude about God's existence. It also identifies how philosophy of religion can be renewed, in its relevance, by its accommodation of divine redemptive immanence and suffering. In a fifiing relation to God, God respects free human agency by not coercing any human will to yield to God or even to receive salient evidence of God's reality. The article considers this prospect. In particular, what if God does not impose a divine self-manifestation on humans but instead has them allow or permit it? This would entail that God does not stalk humans coercively with regard to their decisions about God's existence. An important issue would concern how we humans allow or permit God to emerge as self-manifested (as God) in our experience, thereby expressing God's unique moral character in our experience. If Jesus and the New Testament offer any clue, we would allow divine self-manifestation to us in allowing a morally relevant kind of death-and-resurrection in our lives, that is, a kind of dying into life with God. This article explores

Diversity and disagreement in the religious beliefs among many religious people seem here to stay, however much they bother some inquirers. Even so, the latter inquirers appear not to be similarly bothered by diversity and disagreement in the scientific beliefs among many scientists. They sometimes propose that we should take religious beliefs to be noncognitive and perhaps even nonontological and noncausal regarding their apparent referents, but they do not propose the same for scientific beliefs. 1 Perhaps they would account for this difference in terms of more extensive diversity and disagreement among religious beliefs than scientific beliefs. We shall attend to the alleged significance of diversity and disagreement among religious beliefs, with an eye toward its bearing on epistemic and ontological matters in religion. In particular, we shall ask whether the significance recommends a retreat from first-order to " second-order " religion, as suggested has offered the following statement of what we may call a " second-order " approach to religion, along with a " first-order " approach to science. Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of

The familiar topic of " faith and reason " ranks among the most confusing in all of philosophy and theology. A large part of the problem results from widespread use of an unclear notion of faith, and the corresponding notion of reason likewise suffers from lack of clarity. So, we are often left wondering what the key issue is in the longstanding philosophical controversy over " faith and reason. " This paper offers an approach that illuminates the relation between faith and reason, and explains how faith in God can be well-grounded in reason as evidence, even when reason as an argument does not apply.